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POLL: do you 'safely remove hardware' before you remove your USB (thumb) drive?

I always remove it safely. I've got some "important" things on it (almost all backed up).

Win2k, OpenBSD 3.5-beta, slackware 9.1-stable
 
I voted yes, but that's because I have an external Harddrive and data WILL be corrupted if I don't. I learned that the hard way :/

 
Win XP Pro

Never... and had no problems yet.

I always wait until the light stops flashing, then pull.
 
Originally posted by: Bonesdad
So how do you "Safely remove" one?
Click to expand...

There's a little icon in the systray (It has a green arrow and a hardware card, IIRC). If you open that up, it shows you currently plugged in hot swappable hardware. You can "safely remove hardware" from there.

I don't safely remove my 128MB Jumpdrive. Nothing lost yet. My dad says that with his, he's lost data once by unsafely removing his keychain.
 
Voted YES

Sometimes a program will still have a dialog box open that I forgot about, and it needs access to the USB stick.

With an extra two clicks of the mouse, why not?
 
You can safely remove them without "Safely Remove Hardware" if write caching is disabled in Windows and (sometimes) on the drive. I do this on all my devices and I just yank them out when their activity light no longer blinks.

-Por
 
Xp Pro Nothing messed up yet. But at school we did have a Mac that killed a CF card when it wasn't properly ejected. Macs who woulda thunk it?
 
voted yes. I've got a Sandisk that seems picky about it. Perhaps I'll try the disabling the write caching as Porbleemo suggested.

Tom
 
With XP and NTFS it is not necessary. I pop USB plugs in and out all the time - sometimes deliberately to "wake them up."
 
Originally posted by: biostud666
I voted yes, but that's because I have an external Harddrive and data WILL be corrupted if I don't. I learned that the hard way :/
Click to expand...

Did you have write cache enabled? If the drive isn't writing anything, it should be ok to remove it. Of course, Windows likes to put System Restore info on any drive it can find, even if it's disabled, so it could be doing that.

As for the USB thumbdrives, I've never used the Safely Remove Hardware thing with it, as write cache is always disabled, and I only need to use the drive for small file (<256MB) transfers. I just wait until the little read/write light on the thumbdrive goes off, then pull the thing out of the USB port.
 
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