After you’ve transfered all your data on/off, why cant you simply take out the stick? where’s the harm?
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Have you seen the bolts of lightning that shoot out of the port when you remove it unsafely?? literally hair raising. jk jk it’s just about the possibility of interrupting a relatively slow file transfer of say a large movie or photo or zip file, if you won’t wait for it to finish you’ll lose the file
In simple terms, imagine talking to a friend on the phone and then the call abruptly ends. Pretty shit aye? It’s the same principle here. The Computer needs to say goodbye and stop talking (Read/writing data etc) before it can eject the device. This is to prevent corruption (files like photos, videos, text, music etc from being damaged).
I cannot overstate enough that you should always, *always* eject, lost enough data over the years to act otherwise.
You, the user, may be done with the USB stick. However your Operating System may still have pending file actions to perform on the USB stick.
Windows takes the initiative and pre-marks the USB drive as ‘dirty’ until it is safely ejected, during which it will clear that ‘dirty’ mark. If a device was removed ‘unsafely’, it will see that ‘dirty’ mark and suggest a file check.
You only need to do this if the disk is in use actively. I do IT for a living and never eject the disk. I just know if it is use or not. I have done this tens of thousands of times.
Really you should have the mentality that the USB drive is a transfer medium and not a sole location for a specific file. USB drives are the least secure form of data storage by a mile, so if you are concerned about losing data due to corrupted file system on USB drive, you are doing it wrong.
If you yank the drive during a file transfer and the FS is corrupt, then just reformat and copy the data back on.
It’s just checking to make sure file copy is REALLY complete.
Sometimes the little progress bar will go away, but files aren’t actually done. Or maybe you’ve got a document open that’s saved to the spreadsheet. Or a bunch of possible problems.
“Safely remove” is just a quick check. You’re *probably* safe to remove the Thumb Drive without doing the “Safe to Eject” thing. But if you want more than *probably*, eject it properly.
Part of the issue here is speed. USB writes are SLOW. Hard drive and memory are way faster in comparison. So when you say “copy this 2 gigabyte file to the USB stick”, it is going to take some time. The operating system caches some of this file so if you are doing lots of little things at the same time, it doesn’t have to keep writing change after change after change to the USB stick, it just keeps trying to write the final state. When you stop messing with it, the final state is written as fast as USB transfer rates allow (which is slow). As USB has sped up, the chance of yanking it early keeps going down, but some people still have slow USB ports or drives, so the operating system still has to allow safe ejects.
Because you don’t just PULL OUT at random!! Yeah, you transferred *your* data and you are all done. Great. Good for you. Maybe the stick needs a little more time?!?! Ever think of that?!?! Selfish bastard…
It’s like if your parents say dinner will be ready in half an hour. Half an hour goes by and you come to the kitchen. You could take your bowl of food, but it might not be done cooking.
The “safe to eject” option is asking your parents if the food is ready. They can either tell you to wait a few minutes to finish cooking/plating it up, or hand you the bowl and tell you it’s finished
As others have pointed out, there’s a chance that part of your files or filesystem data haven’t made it out to the USB device yet, leading to corruption if you pull the device out prematurely. What makes things worse is that the system might not be in a hurry to get the data out. When you hit “eject” or “safely remove media” or whatever, that tells the OS to get that data pushed out the door, *and* mark the filesystem on the device as “clean”, *and* unmount the device from the computer’s file systems.
Windows has a nice feature where whenever it doesn’t have anything better to do, it goes ahead and pushes the data out and marks the file system as clean even if not actually unmounted. This means that if you do yank the device out without notice, there’s a good chance that nothing’s damaged, and I think the OS knows not to complain under those circumstances. Mac and Linux probably do the same thing, but lack the “nah, it’s cool” feature.
Your OS typically writes the data into your USB when the cache is full. To save time it will collect xbit data and then write them into usb as a whole rather than doing it one by one. Sometimes there are still bits of data left to be aggregated which could be lost when you remove the stick without safe ejection and lose that chunk of data.
Second reason is ownership- an usb can have multiple process being performed on it – copying , reading , writing at the same time . safe ejection will inform you that usb is busy/occupied.
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