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Do you guys eject your USB hard drives before unplugging?

S

SLCentral

Diamond Member
I've got a laptop as my main setup, and have two 1TB USB hard drives plugged in at all times when I'm at my desk. I often forget to eject the drives before unplugging them, and sometimes even when I try to, it gives me an error saying it is in use (when it isn't), and I unplug it anyways.

Does everyone do this, or am I causing harm to the drives?
 
Probably better to unmount first. That way, you make sure that everything in cache gets written. Then again, maybe the USB controller on the enclosure or the HD itself has logic to commit the write? This is assuming that the drive is separately powered, of course, and entirely speculative.
 
I never do. As long as you're sure it isn't being written to, it's perfectly safe. They can corrupt if you pull it out while it's being read. It doesn't hurt the drive, but you could lose data. It's more of a concern if you don't have an activity LED. If that's the case, it's probably better to eject it.
 
If write caching is enabled, you need to "Safely Remove Hardware", otherwise you don't. XP defaults to disable write caching on portable drives.

As a general rule, if it's on Windows 2000 and earlier, always safely remove. If it's a newer OS, don't worry about it.
 
I almost always do. The extra 3 seconds to do it does not really bother me.

KT
 
Depends on which machine. On the win2k machine at church I do it all the time, since I've actually seen it where I copy files, pull out, and the files never actually made it.

On my home XP machine, rarely. In fact if I do, I get this hotplug.dll error that I have not been bothered to troubleshoot, so I just avoid it. No issues, XP seems to handle it quite well, just need to give it time to buffer and make sure there's no activity.

In linux I usually do a umount.
 
i always run the drive with quick removal mode and eject. otherwise you'll throw an error ftdisk in eventvwr system log.

if you ever see instability with an external drive - make sure you have it in quickremoval mode. it forces windows to use smaller packets over usb and obviously doesn't do write-back caching. this cures about 99% of the instability i've seen in drives due to a number of reasons.

but yeah always eject any usb storage device. if you have to reboot you can do that to free the device up.
 
Some computers have software that attempts to access any newly inserted usb drives. In fact some have multiple programs. I have found that despite my belief the drive is no longer being accessed, it often is in the background. So I have switched to always ejecting it.
When tranferring a large amount of data, even ejecting the drive can take quite a while after the files have been transferred, because the system keeps saying the drive is busy. In those cases I shut down the computer and remove it.
 
I eject them unless they are being little bastards (won't let me eject even if all programs are closed. I might look in the services list to see if something catches my eye, but ... It's just to make sure they're not being used (written to) so data doesn't get corrupted as many posts have noted already.
 
It is best to eject, though theoretically hot-swappable (which most stuff is now days) do not require it.

Ive had good luck ejecting my drives (including the external 2TB Hitachi Simple Drive) by making sure no applications using the drive are open, then opening "My Computer" then closing the window. That seems to be working (ie, allows ejection) for external HDDs; IOMEGAs & the big Hitachi drive.
 
C1 said:
It is best to eject, though theoretically hot-swappable (which most stuff is now days) do not require it.

Ive had good luck ejecting my drives (including the external 2TB Hitachi Simple Drive) by making sure no applications using the drive are open, then opening "My Computer" then closing the window. That seems to be working (ie, allows ejection) for external HDDs; IOMEGAs & the big Hitachi drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah what is strange is an SSD is on AHCI which makes it show up in the Eject Devices list, and AHCI the way I understand it is hot-swappable, so why do I need to click on "eject *_device_*" first?
 
ChaiBabbaChai said:
Yeah what is strange is an SSD is on AHCI which makes it show up in the Eject Devices list, and AHCI the way I understand it is hot-swappable, so why do I need to click on "eject *_device_*" first?
Click to expand...

I am probably wrong, but I thought the definition of "hot swappable" doesn't necessarily mean that you can unplug it anytime with 100% guarantee of no data loss but that you don't need to reboot after you plug it in or unplug it.
 
Itchrelief said:
I am probably wrong, but I thought the definition of "hot swappable" doesn't necessarily mean that you can unplug it anytime with 100% guarantee of no data loss but that you don't need to reboot after you plug it in or unplug it.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think you're right. So you still need to eject it but no need to reboot and power down. Got it. 😀
 
If all caching for the drive is disabled and you're making sure nothing is writing to it as you unplug it, you can just rip it out - no dataloss to be expected. If either one or both windows and drive caching is enabled, you need to eject it, otherwise you're just calling for data loss sooner or later.

Personally, I always eject it, regardless of cache status. It just became a habit, that way I cant accidently cause harm on other people machines where caching may be enabled...
 
I always eject the drive, My wife pulled one with some personal pictures on it without ejecting and I had to format the flash drive to use it again. It messed up the file structure. Just a fyi eject or reboot the only safe methods.
 
I've seen flash cards lose formatting because they were pulled without ejecting. In Vista or 7 I almost always use the eject feature. In XP I sometimes do. It all depends on how important the information is to me.
 
Does everyone do this, or am I causing harm to the drives?
Click to expand...

I always dismount a drive before removing it, doing otherwise isn't smart. The hardware itself is made to be hotplugged so there's no damage to the drive itself, but you risk losing data or corrupting the filesystem on it.
 
unplug the drive then look at eventvwr system log - see a nice FTDISK error saying the log was not flushed ? oops.

windows doesn't lie - if you do it wrong - its in the eventvwr.
 
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