# Does Safely Ejecting From a USB Port Actually Do Anything?



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

Is there any harm to be incurred by just pulling a flash drive out? Why do we need safe removal at all?

Historically, Operating Systems treat disks as objects that can be trusted not to change state suddenly. When reading or writing files, the OS expects the files to remain accessible and not suddenly disappear in mid-read or mid-write.

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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Quick answer is
If you value your data and are or have been writing to that drive, USE SAFELY REMOVE.


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## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

I know with 98SE I would get no message so did not understand why XP had the safely to remove. 
But now understand you need to make sure all data is safe.
Same goes with trying to close down the flash drive and I keep seeing it's busy and I knew it was not but I had a program like image viewer I open to look at images on the flash drive still open. Guess it wants to make sure all other programs that can remember is closed so it writes data that may only be in memory till it closes down is taken care of.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Windows will check to see if any "handles" http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/F/file_handle.html are still open and if so assume that it is in use. The problem lies where lazy programmers fail to close the handles they have finished with before exiting so the machine thinks they are still in use.


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## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

Thanks Dave,

That is what I have seen happen to me.


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## flavallee (May 12, 2002)

Different Windows versions have different wording for safely removing a USB thumb drive.

In Windows 7 for my USB thumb drive, it says "Eject Cruzer Gator".

Once the "Safe to remove hardware" window disappears and the light on it stops flashing, I remove it.

I've yet to lose or have any data in it get corrupted.

And it takes only a few seconds to do.

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## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

I got XP and sometimes the light flashing seem to go on a long time.
I wonder if Diskeeper is doing something.

I got Diskeeper 2009 Pro for free and now forget if I had to put a key in so not sure if I can install it to get it to work but love the program and really need to get newer version that works on bigger drives and SSD too. I deleted email I got and I had PM's about it at Calendar of Updates but that site when down so all got lost new site is being made but all the pass is gone. Well almost all because I made the Banner I had all the image layers so it can be used and or edit. 
It's a great program to have.
I won PerfectDisk 10 too but I like Diskeeper 2009 Pro better. 

Only data I ever lost was the old Zip drives and I think the trouble with them was the Iomega software. Later I did not install the software and I never had trouble.

I need another PC and lots of time to hook the zip and jaz drives back up and some big hard drives to look to see what I got and put all in better order because it will be better than all the zips. 

How things have changed from my first Tandy 1000HX with no Hard drive. I still have it but it stopped running short time after a move when I was cut off on the road and hit the brakes and it went from one end of truck bed to the other so got a shock. Be nice to get it going and play with. Just backup the one floppy and your safe. But could play around doing things that can screw up the computer you got now but with that I just shut down and boot the floppy again. So you don't mine doing things you would not ever want to do on the PC your using now.


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## goldenmotley (May 6, 2015)

Just to make sure that all datas are safe. I've read a detailed explanation i how to geek, if you still have doubts you can read the article here http://www.howtogeek.com/172931/why-exactly-do-you-need-to-safely-eject-usb-media/


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## RolandJS (Mar 3, 2005)

Another source indicated one can disable write-caching for USB devices via device manager -- particular USB device. Windows 7 calls such allow fast removal. Because I value my data, I still go through the Safely Remove USB device process.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

If you are doing a lot of writing, like backing up to a USB disk, you ought to turn cacheing on, unless you have a LOT of time to spare.


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