What does ejecting a flash drive or SD card from a computer do, and what happens if you don’t?
In: Technology
It basically tells the computer to stop using the flash drive/sd card.
If a program is reading or writing data to the card and you just yank it out, it can cause the program to crash and the files on the flash drive to become corrupt.
Ejecting the drive is like putting the lid on the cookie jar before putting it away.
Sometimes, you put it away and don’t spill any cookies.
Sometimes a bunch of cookies fall out and break on the ground and then you can’t eat them.
So always put the lid on just to be safe.
It tells the computer to stop reading the device. This way it’s not in the middle of reading/writing to the device resulting in data corruption/loss.
Ejecting unmounts the drive from the file system. It ensures that no program is writing/reading data on the drive, so when you remove it no program will have issues and no files on the drive will be half-written.
If you remove it without ejecting odds are nothing will happen – most programs are smart enough to know this might happen and plan for it – but it is possible that files on the drive will become corrupted and unreadable.
Latest Answers