Do You Really Need to Eject USB Drives?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
992 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos
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wait sorry what's this video called what do you mean eject it's not a cd you
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just yank it out right well
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you can do that but in this case eject
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doesn't mean this it means to tell your operating system
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to wrap up whatever it's doing with the usb drive to prepare it for
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yanking out so think of it as partially disconnecting the drive it's still
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physically plugged in but your computer can't really talk to it anymore but hold
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on a second we didn't have to do anything fancy when we physically
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ejected cd-roms back in the prehistoric 1990s
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so why is there this general conception that ejecting your flash drives is a
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good idea well the most obvious benefit of ejecting your device first is that it
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prevents your data from being corrupted if your system is busy writing something
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to the drive if you pull your media out
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before your computer has finished working with it you might come back
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later to find that the graduate thesis that you wanted to store on it is now
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totally unreadable causing you to flunk out of your graduate program get dumped
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by your girlfriend and ultimately end up living in a box behind tim hortons true
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story happened to a friend of mine so yeah it might seem pretty obvious that
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you don't want to rip out a thumb drive during a file save operation any more
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than you would take out a hot pocket for consumption after only one minute in the
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microwave but what if you've safely closed whatever it
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is that you're working on and you just want to grab the drive and get on with
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your day this is where things get a little bit gray because it partly
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depends on what operating system you're using and whether you've fiddled with a
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certain setting you see Windows offers a feature called write caching for
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removable devices that's designed to improve
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speed with it turned on any data that you try
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to transfer to your flash drive is held in a cache in your system memory so
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instead of forcing a program to wait around for the data transfer to finish
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Windows will instead wait for a more opportune time to do multiple data
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transfers at once the downside of this speed boost is that
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it leaves your usb drives much more susceptible to corruption if you be it
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accidentally or on purpose pull them out without ejecting them first as your pc
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might show that it's finished copying the data but it might not actually be
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done ejecting the drive will command your
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computer to go ahead and flush anything in the right cache to your drive
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immediately and it will prompt you when you can actually safely remove it
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the good news is that write caching offers a negligible performance boost in most
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situations so in the event that it's not already disabled you can go ahead and
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turn it off here on Linux and macOS it is typically
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enabled by default though so make sure that you eject your drives before
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removing them if you haven't given your soul to cortana so then back to the
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original question yeah that one if you're using Windows and have right
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caching turned off is it okay to just remove your thumb drive without ejecting
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it assuming obviously that you're not in the middle of saving something to it the
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answer is a definite probably however
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there is the possibility that your os could still be writing small amounts of
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data in the background depending on exactly how your programs deal with
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saved files and i have personally experienced previously
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working drives ending up with corrupted data on them that i wasn't even using by
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doing this so while the average Windows user probably
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doesn't have too much to worry about it is also probably worth taking the
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extra two seconds to click eject if you can't figure out what to do while you
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wait just try closing your eyes and picturing a cd tray sliding out for a
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