Think twice before you skip ‘safely remove’ option while removing USB

At one point in life, most of us have removed a USB drive without safely ejecting it, thinking that it does not really matter. However, unknown to many, it actually does matter.

Saving the extra 10 seconds in our life and skipping the safety eject option, we carelessly pull out the USB drive and it works totally fine the next time we plug it in. However, safely removing the drive could actually help rightly save the data and software.

A question was asked on the question-and-answer site, Quora, regarding this carelessly ejecting USB drive to which Philip Remaker, a distinguished engineer and a published writer answered that it confuses the computer since it is reading the file, which can result to ‘lost data, corrupted file systems, crashing programs, or hanging computers requiring a reboot’. Moreover, if the user has altered or uploaded new data on the drive, it can be risky and might result in the files being lost forever.

Remaker further explained in layman terms that when the drive is pulled out from the disk without warning, all programs ‘freak out’ about the sudden loss of media saying, “Hey! I was using that!”

He explained that when ordered to remove the device safely, the safely remove hardware commands flushes all the active writes to disk and alerts all the programs about the USB drive removal so that they could take action. It also alerts the user if the programs fail to take action saying that it is not safe to remove the drive now.

“You can remove a disk at any time, but you are at the mercy of how well programs using the disk cope with the sudden disappearance of that disk,” Remaker concluded.