Do you "safely remove usb"?

katz

katz

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I don't believe I have ever used the "Safely remove hardware" icon & stopped the usb service before pulling a flash drive, mp3 player, camera, etc. A customer saw me do this the other day & questioned me about it.

I've never had a problem doing it this way. Any of you guys follow protocol and do it correctly, or do you just pull the plug?
 
I don't even try to be good about this anymore. I just make sure it's done writing and it's never been a problem. :rolleyes:
 
I do just pull out flash drives on windows machines, but it's a good idea to eject them properly on Macs. I recently had a flash drive scrambled when I yanked it from a MacBook and had to reformat it.
 
I used to just pull them but since I completely overhauled all my desktops and servers with fresh installs and proper backups I decided to do things the right way - ejecting the media. I also have named all my removable media in the Properties menu of the medium. This helps a lot when there are multiple drives of the same kind plugged in.

I found that some of my removable media doesn't play well when it is selected in explorer. I get a green loading tab across the top and it takes forever for the files to show up. If I get impatient and pull the drive it can cause a temporary system lockup until it can straighten things out. I don't know if this is due to the media or the format but it seems to happen on FAT formatted drives vs NTFS drives.
 
Generally speaking I just pull them out making sure they are done working first. If I am unhooking an external HDD with important backups etc., I'll take the time to eject. I personally have never had any problems either way.

I am looking forward to Xander's reply on this topic.
 
tankman1989 said:
I found that some of my removable media doesn't play well when it is selected in explorer. I get a green loading tab across the top and it takes forever for the files to show up.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've got a couple of sticks like that, I've tried doing a long format on them but it makes no difference. Haven't been bothered enough to try them on another machine, it may be my machine that's fallen out with them.

I never ever do the "safely remove", just make sure that I don't pull the stick out until a good 5-10 seconds after I've written to them.

When I do my weekly toolset-dump to sticks I have 7 of them connected at once and paste the tool-filesystem onto them, copied simultaneously and then pull them all out ready for use.
 
I always try and do the safe removal process. About 3 years I pulled my 'Tools' stick after updating and every file and folder was renamed xxx .

I had waited 30 / 60 seconds and assumed it had finished writing.

It did give me a chance to practice with my data recovery process.
 
TechLady said:
I don't even try to be good about this anymore. I just make sure it's done writing and it's never been a problem. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Exactly. Even back in the days of floppy drives. I wait like 2 second after the light turns off and then I eject the disk. "Safely removing" the USB stick serves what purpose now? It's not like your trying to pluck a PCI card out of the motherboard for crying out loud.
 
I do it with clients media and when cients see.. never use it on my own media when none is around :cool:
 
Yes same as most others although if I see a customer using one I always tell them to make sure what it on there isn't the only copy of the file(s) if it is important. I'm surprised how many people use that as their file storage :eek:

Just recently i put my bunch of usbs onto my workbench and one was 'grabbed' by my magnetiser/demagnetiser block and wiped it clean. :o
 
I do for USB Hard Drives but not for sticks. I have no luck with USB HDDs at all. The longest one has lasted has been about a year. So I'm extra careful with them.
 
katz said:
Any of you guys follow protocol and do it correctly, or do you just pull the plug?
Click to expand...

Yes...I try to properly shut it down when I can, esp when in front of a customer, and esp when it's in their computer.

I've had USB drives scrambled before...or frequently prompt for a format....because I yanked them. And I've seen USB ports with wonky power issues..something I'm sure hot pulling out a USB stick doesn't help..thus I never do that on a clients machine....why risk making their USB port wonky?
 
It depends, but typically, I safely remove them regardless of OS (windows, linux, mac). I have seen way too man issues caused by not doing it. The times that I do not, is when Windows complains that the drive is being used when it is clearly not being used. It doesn't take but a couple seconds to be safe rather than sorry.
 
I have just pulled them out before but because I have a couple damaged usb flash drives, I don't anymore. Every time I use the damaged ones, Windows wants to run a chkdsk on them, they mount very slowly, and errors are produced in the windows event logs due to it. I have let windows chkdsk run on them and didn't make a difference. So...Yeah, I recommend safely removing usb drives when possible.
What does anyone use to check to see why a drive can't be safely removed? I have ran into this and have recheck everything and can only guess that the antivirus is scanning it or something. I usually just pull it out. I know there is some programs to see why a flash drive won't safely dismount... What do you guys use in this case?
 
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