I use flash drives and external hard drives regularly and am forever plugging and unplugging them. I don't normally "safely remove hardware" in Windows XP for flash drives etc and haven't experienced problems to date. However, I'm wondering if I should???
What are your thoughts???
You wont physically damage a device, its there for data saving purposes.
If the computer is reading from the drive when you unplug it, nothing bad will happen, but if you do it while its writing, it can cause problems.
At best, the file that is being written will be lost / corrupted / not fully saved. At worst, if its writing to the FAT tables (this basically provides the location of each file on your drive) then you can loose considerably more data.
Another issue is the same that photographers can have if they shut the camera down too early while there is still data in the image buffer waiting to be written to the card.
You can resolve this by going into the devices properties and changing to the option of “quick removal” by disabling caching to the drive.
I just look at the light on my drive and see if its being accessed. If it is, I don’t pull it, if its not, im not too fussed about a safe removal.
Its worth noting that windows can go a bit crazy if you pull a drive when a file is open from it (eg. You load a word document from the drive and pull it while its still open). Its worth saving the file to a local drive before pulling it.
When it comes to hard drives though, always use safe removal. Ive just noticed that my quick removal icon has gone, which is annoying as I hotswap drives quite a bit. I need to look into that :\
Originally Posted by Saracen
there are 2 ways of dealing with slow external drives - synchronous or asynchronous transfer. if it's synchronous, then whenever you do something like copy a file, it's written straight away. with asynchronous, no real actions are performed - the OS simply keeps a list of things that it knows you want to do. in synchronous mode, you don't need to stop the drive before removing it. in async, the data is only actually written when you unmount the drive - meaning it's vital to do the unmounting.
on *nix, this is determined by the use of the 'sync' or 'async' mount parameters. on windows, there's a clickybox for something like "optimize this drive for quick removal", where on means sync, off means async.
I never do it. I think the problem is not really so much with external hard drives, but with USB sticks b/c an electrical current is carried through the USB jack and it might short circuit the internal components of the USB stick if you don't pull it out smoothly when the power is still flowing.
I'm no expert but that's just what I heard.
find any USB device and look at the connector. notice how two of the four lines are longer? that's precisely to stop the scenario you suggest - the ground pins always connect first and last.
the reason for "stopping" external drives is to ensure that all the data is actually written.
its called write-through caching aswell, if youre looking for options
apart from data integrity, windows can get confused.
My laptop won't recognise two of my externel USB boxes because i spent an anfternoon plugging and unplugging them moving data around etc. forgot to safely removing them once (thought i had already done it) and they now aren't recognised. The led on my hub just blinks at me when i plug them in. All the ports etc are working so are the boxes (tested on another machine) but windows doesn't want to mount them. I'm guessing this is a rare occurence, but is annoying.
Anyone know how to get windows to 'forget' these were ever installed so it does the whole Found New Hardware thing again and sets them up correctly?
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