Do you safely remove hardware

Yeah you voted for when necessary

Never.
I just wait for the activity light on the device to finish blinking.
All that option is useful for is to finish any current read/write activity after that file, then let you know its finished.
But if you already know its finished, because the light is not blinking, then its safe.

Edit: Made a typo. But I've been quoted already

xarden said:

Never.
I just wait for the activity light on the device to finish blinking.
All that option is useful for is to finish any current read/write activity after that fine, then let you know its finished.
But if you already know its finished, because the light is not blinking, then its safe.

I always do this

fseal said:

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.

Thanks a lot for this!.

I always safe remove the hardware. Only a few seconds for a healthier hardware.
However I do get annoyed when the device can't be safely removed because apparently there is some program that still using it.



Even though I'm sure I can safely eject it. But even then I'm making an effort and restarting / shutting down the machine if possible.

Here SanDisk's reference to this issue:
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1168
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/de.../308/related/1

I always use the safely remove with any Mass Storage Class device, whether it is my camera, external HDD,the card reader in my printer, or one of my MP3 players. I have had MP3 players in the past that operated under the MTP protocol, however, and with those it is not necessary, as long as any transfer has ceased.

As several have said before, better safe than sorry.