Plugging a USB device in your computer enables the ‘safe remove’ option, but do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way?
Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin.
That’s not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or—even more unlikely—the entire storage device.
What could go wrong?
First, some context, and the bad possibilities.
Say you’re copying a file from your computer to a USB drive. Your machine may actually be using something called a write cache; instead of transferring the file from one device to the other directly, it’s using that cache to make the process more efficient. The cache is just local memory storage that your computer is really good at writing to, quickly.
With a write cache, your computer will finish the copying process in the background. All of it happens very quickly, from a human perspective. A Mac’s operating system always uses the write cache, but on a Windows machine, the user can decide whether to enable it or not; the default is that the write cache is off.
Managing data in the write cache is where the “eject” feature comes in. Knowing about the write cache is key because there is a theoretical risk that while you think the computer has finished transferring your files, it actually hasn’t.
So what bad stuff could happen if you pull the thumb drive out while you’re copying a file to it, or while the write cache is doing something in the background?
The first possibility is that the file you were copying to the USB drive gets corrupted (although chances are the original file on your computer would still be okay). After that, there’s the chance that another file on that thumb drive gets corrupted, too.
The biggest problem would be if you were to corrupt the USB drive itself—the file system metadata could be ruined, meaning the driver wouldn’t know where things are stored.
But let’s be optimistic:
In short, follow these rules of thumb if you want to live dangerously and just yank that USB drive out: Don’t do it while it is actively copying, and don’t do it within milliseconds after it has finished. Be aware that a Mac will be using a write cache, while a Windows machine probably is not. The more modern the equipment, the better your chances that nothing bad will happen.
Finally, it’s best to play it safe when dealing with something like an external hard drive (although it may be hard to corrupt a modern, solid-state external drive). If you’re using one to make backups of your computer, for example, like with Time Machine on a Mac, it’s best to hit eject. That rule applies even more so to an old, spinning drive. It takes much longer to write information to a spinning drive than it does something with solid-state storage, and since it has moving parts, it is more susceptible to damage.
So, if your USB device is idle, you can remove it directly without any worries.
Exposure to heat, physical damage, and wear from writing data and plugging/unplugging are far more likely to hurt it. But there's no need to be nervous about removing a USB stick as long as you've let any transfers complete. These were some common myths which people still believe but now you know that they are just myths.
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