Safely remove hardware

I have a USB drive and swap it in and out of the PC with impunity.

At the weekend my brother was downloading some photos for me to my USB drive from his PC and he was following the procedure of using 'Safely remove hardware' under WinXP.

Is there a risk of not doing this, i.e. does my approach potentially damage the USB drive or PC ?

In many cases it's not necessary but it depends on the hardware and I have seen the filesystems on flash drives getting corrupted and needing to be reformatted due to them being plugged out without using the safe option. Probably best to choose the safe removal option just to be careful. I do.

notes from the field...Ive regularly seen USB keys have docs/spreadhseets/files saved to them, then with absolute wanton abandon, take the key out, transfer to other machine, insert key and find the file hasnt saved.... Ive reproduced this behaviour several times, dont know whether its related to OS versions or hardware but I do know choosing the "safely remove hardware" option works every time, so its what I do now in the office.
Cant say I've seen corruption on them from the fast withdrawal method but it wouldnt surprise me.

I think that there may be an option somewhere to control whether or not changes are flushed immediately to such drives when they are saved rather than being cached for asynchronous flushing. However I can't remember where this option might be. Either way it's probably just as well to use the safe eject option to be on the safe side. Some hardware actually (e.g. some PCMCIA/CardBus cards) requires this.

ClubMan said:

I think that there may be an option somewhere to control whether or not changes are flushed immediately to such drives when they are saved rather than being cached for asynchronous flushing.

Click to expand...

OK - I happened across this the other night and was glad to see that I wasn't imagining things. With the USB pendrive attached to the PC

• Right click on My Computer on the desktop or in the Start menu
• Choose Properties
• Click on the Hardware property page tab
• Click the Device Manager... button
• In Device Manager expand the tree at the Disk Drives node
• Double click on the relevant HardDrive USB Device
• Click on the Policies property page tab
• Check how the Write caching and Safe Removal option is set and change it if necessary

Hope this helps!