this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
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Who unplugs external devices without unmounting them? Computer 101.
It’s fine on most if not all USB thumb drives nowadays. Windows has disabled its write cache on removable devices since like 2016. It was more annoying than anything anyway since the cache just soaked up all the writes into system memory with no throttling. Then you could be sitting there for half an hour not knowing the progress of the writes on the drive if it was a slow flash drive.
For external SSDs it’s a must to do a safe removal since the drive’s write cache will almost always be enabled, or if it’s disabled the drive’s performance will tank. Not sure about DRAM-less SSDs though. Also, SSDs can corrupt more than just the data being modified, so the stakes are higher.
For external SMR hard drives the write cache will always be enabled since they basically can’t function without it, so it would be a good idea to do a safe removal then. Plus the drive gets shutdown cleanly. A surprise power cut makes the head slam back with the residual energy from the spinning platters and I’ve seen it kill a couple drives.
TL;DR thumb drives you can just yank on windows, everything else you should probably do a safe removal
Mac users are built different
Well when your PC holds your USB device hostage for no apparent reason (looking at you, Windows), sometimes you have to just yank it.
I agree, it’s a pita to have to go through that stupid eject business but I learned quite awhile back with trashed flash drive information when I’d pull out before doing the Windows ritual.
Problem is I will plug a drive in, not even write anything to it, and it frequently keeps it hostage indefinitely sometimes. Either shut down the PC or yank it out.
I learned to wait awhile after reading from or writing to it. It’s usually a related app that hasn’t fully shut down to “release” the drive or some buffering.
Thanks. I'm aware of that, but unfortunately there's nothing to tell you what is keeping it from being released. Heck even just plugging it in without accessing it, it can be locked.
The only thing I've found is this utility that costs $30: https://safelyremove.com/features.htm
This is the kind of stuff that should be made readily available by the OS instead of a generic "can't eject now" nonsense.
I just disable windows caching to USB devices, and solves the problem, but shouldn't need to.
What exactly is it "trashing" because I've been doing this for 20 years and have never lost a file. To be clear, I never put anything on a USB flash stick I'm not ready to lose in the first place, and I could just re-transfer the file or reformat it if necessary.
I even do it with bootable USB drives, windows installation, etc. Never had a problem. Not saying it's incorrect, I'm just really curious what information is being lost or corrupted when doing this, and if it really matters for the vast majority of situations, because my personal experience tells me no.
edit: I guess it's a write cache thing, I do vaguely remember this being a concern in the past, but I never had issues with just pulling the drive regardless.