What is the point of "Safely remove hardware" icon?

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I thought USB is supposed to be hot-swappable? But my boss said I
should always click on the "safely remove hardware" icon before
removing the thumbdrive, otherwise it might be fried. Is that true?
 
I thought USB is supposed to be hot-swappable? But my boss said I
should always click on the "safely remove hardware" icon before
removing the thumbdrive, otherwise it might be fried. Is that true?
Click to expand...

Semi-true. Your USB device won't be fried but if it is
a storage device then its data could be corrupted.
 
When you click "Safely Remove", Windows lock any other apps out from writing
to the drive, flushes any buffers, and then dismounts the drive. It's like
the difference between rebooting with Ctl+Alt+Del and pulling the power plug
(which can result in lost chains, etc.)

--
Fletcher James
President
Levit & James, Inc.

(703)771-1549
MailTo:[email protected]
http://www.levitjames.com
 
Hello,
Never argue with a boss !
Click to expand...

Very helpful;-) He doesn't want to argue. He's just interested in who's
right.

First, you're right that USB is hot-swappable. This is the great
advantage of it:)

The problem is not caused by the hardware. I've never seen any device
which will cause physical damage if you unplug it during runtime. It's
just the filesystem. Harddisk or flash memory is much slower than RAM.
So most OSes don't write all data to the device immediately. They have
some cache where an amount of data is stored in between. So you can edit
one file 1000 times and the flash memory is written only one time. When
you click on that icon Windows writes all remaining data to the device.

When you unplug the device before some data could be lost. However, it
depends on the filesystem (FAT / NTFS / ...), device and OS if
unplugging the device without "removing" it before will cause problems.


Daniel Böhmer, Germany
 
Pegasus had already replied to tell him who's right, so I didn't go on to
repeat him :-)

regards, Richard
 
(e-mail address removed) wrote in @z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
I thought USB is supposed to be hot-swappable? But my boss said I
should always click on the "safely remove hardware" icon before
removing the thumbdrive, otherwise it might be fried. Is that true?
Click to expand...

You can't fry it but you could lose data.
But you can set it so you won't.
Go to device manager, disk drives, right click the removable drive and
choose Properties. Under Properties, pick the Policy Tab, and pick
"Optimize for Safe Removal"
See http://mewnlite.com/dm.gif
 
I thought USB is supposed to be hot-swappable? But my boss said I
should always click on the "safely remove hardware" icon before
removing the thumbdrive, otherwise it might be fried. Is that true?
Click to expand...

Flushing software and hardware caches, before removing power,
sounds like a good reason for such an icon. No sense leaving all
those sectors behind, that are still in computer memory or
in a disk controller's onboard cache :-)

Paul
 
So I should click on the icon if I've written anything to the
thumbdrive. But what if I only read data from it? Then can I just
remove the drive without clicking on the icon?
 
Menno Hershberger said:
You can't fry it but you could lose data.
But you can set it so you won't.
Go to device manager, disk drives, right click the removable drive and
choose Properties. Under Properties, pick the Policy Tab, and pick
"Optimize for Safe Removal"
See http://mewnlite.com/dm.gif
Click to expand...

Thanks for that info...
 
So I should click on the icon if I've written anything to the
thumbdrive. But what if I only read data from it? Then can I just
remove the drive without clicking on the icon?
Click to expand...

Click the damn thing anyway. Don't be a lazy bitch. Even just reading, with
Windows you never know what it's doing, you could end up with corrupted data
or an unusable thunbdrive.
 
...no need to be rude !

regards, Richard


~misfit~ said:
Click the damn thing anyway. Don't be a lazy bitch. Even just reading,
with Windows you never know what it's doing, you could end up with
corrupted data or an unusable thunbdrive.
Click to expand...
 
RJK said:
..no need to be rude !

regards, Richard
Click to expand...

Fair point, my apologies. It just seemed that, with the amount of time taken
to post, read replies and post again the thing could have been safely
removed several dozen times already. Also, it sounds like it's the boss's
hardware and the boss's time, so why not do as the boss says. <shrug>
 
So I should click on the icon if I've written anything to the
thumbdrive. But what if I only read data from it? Then can I just
remove the drive without clicking on the icon?
Click to expand...


If you remove it without clicking the icon you should get a
warning message you had to click anyway, it's not as though
you can save a lot of time. The easiest method may be to
simply right-click on the drive letter (shortcut or in My
Computer if not elsewhere) and choose "Eject" on the context
menu.
 
kony said:
If you remove it without clicking the icon you should get a
warning message you had to click anyway, it's not as though
you can save a lot of time. The easiest method may be to
simply right-click on the drive letter (shortcut or in My
Computer if not elsewhere) and choose "Eject" on the context
menu.
Click to expand...

If you use Safely Remove Hardware, then a reboot will be needed to use the
device again.
 
Sorry
It looks like I was wrong.
Click to expand...


Not necessarily, I've come across systems that did need
rebooted before they'd pick up the same device again. Seems
like I used to know why that is, but I'm run out of physical
memory and it's bured in a swapfile somewhere.
 
kony said:
The easiest method may be to
simply right-click on the drive letter (shortcut or in My
Computer if not elsewhere) and choose "Eject" on the context
menu.
Click to expand...

Apparently admin previleges are required to use 'Eject'
on Explorer's context menu...
 
Menno said:
Go to device manager, disk drives, right click the removable drive and
choose Properties. Under Properties, pick the Policy Tab, and pick
"Optimize for Safe Removal"
See http://mewnlite.com/dm.gif
Click to expand...

For me it seems to be an urban legend that these setting
make any difference under Windows XP.
'Optimize for performance' enables the user to format
the drive with NTFS, that's all. But for NTFS formatted
USB drives write behind caching is always activated while
it's never for FAT or FAT32 formated USB drives.
After format an USB with NTFS you can switch back to
'Optimize for Safe Removal' and get again no difference.

Even there is a bit truth in the captions of the settings
they are very misleading.


http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html


Greetings from Germany

Uwe
 
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