Do you safely remove hardware

youllbelost said:

i assume that everyone knows that there is an option in the OS for optimizing for safely removal or not..It is NOT necessary to safely remove a drive.

That optimization only hastens the flushing of files and reduces other write acess to the drive. But it isn't a magic pill. In fact the only reason that so many people can get away with not using the safe eject is that USB thumb drives and other flash media are mounted optimized for safe removal already :)

But there is no way to reduce the error window to zero on a fat file system. If you just pull the drive at exactly the wrong time (Or when still writing) you will lose data at least or even hose the file system requiring a repair (and losing even more data).

Clicking safely remove causes windows to wait till the write is done before telling you it can be safely removed at minimum... :) It will also hold off on new writes by programs, telling them the drive is not availble befor eyou remove it, sort of "putting a foot in the door" so you can even get a window of oppourtunity to remove the drive.

I do it when it is needed. I always do it when transferring files to my phone or other drives, but for cameras and the printer no, or if the drive has been plugged in for a while and I know that nothing is transferring I just pull it out.

Has anyone else noticed that the symptoms in How to avoid popup with scan prompt when plugin USB stick? occur if you remove the USB stick without going through the "Safe removal" route??

wilywombat said:

Has anyone else noticed that the symptoms in How to avoid popup with scan prompt when plugin USB stick? occur if you remove the USB stick without going through the "Safe removal" route??

The general reason for that is that Windows thinks that the fat32 file system is damaged.

If it starts happening after pulling a USB drive then yes the file system was damaged because of not safely ejecting the drive. You need to scan and repair it. The warning should go away. You can scan manually by right clicking the drive wntry in explorer and slecting Properties then Tools then Check Now...