| Dave Flowerday |
12-06-2007 15:21 |
Re: flash drive
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pavan
(Post 631542)
That "Safely Remove Your Hardware" mumbo jumbo is exactly that, mumbo jumbo. If you use your brain and wait until the drive is stopped and than remove it you will be safe.
|
It's not mumbo-jumbo. If you know what's going on under the hood you'd understand why. It's difficult for you, as a user, to understand when the OS is finished writing to the drive. If your flash drive has a light on it that turns on during writes, that helps, but it's no guarantee.
With Windows XP, write caching has been disabled on removable drives, so the likelihood of corruption is low, but not zero. Basically, each time you yank it out without safely removing it you take the risk of corrupting either the file you were working on or the whole disk (if the FAT is corrupted). If you're using Windows 2000, I believe it still caches writes to removable drives so I highly recommend removing the drives safely only on that OS.
Now, that being said, I myself yank drives out w/o proper shutdown all the time. However, I only keep data on my flash drive that is also copied somewhere else so if I manage to corrupt it it's really only an annoyance. Worst case I corrupt the file or need to reformat the drive, but both of those are acceptable risks to me. It's very, very unlikely that you could actually damage a disk to the point of not being able to reformat it by unsafely removing it. |
