Why Should We Remove USB Device Safely ?

One day i was working in my friends PC, and when i was about to remove the USB device he shouted Wait ! let me remove USB device safely , He said. I was wondering since then, should we remove USB device safely ? what happens if we don’t ?. i am sure you have come across these questions at some point in your life.

Windows get pretty annoyed if you don’t remove USB device safely, and prompts you with a message saying” USB device removed unexpectedly”. Seeing that, many normal users freak out and think. ” I should safely remove USB device from next time”. While safely removing USB is just a simple task, many of us seem to ignore it and pull the plug off.

Do we loose Memory for not removing USB device safely ?

Yes you may, if you remove the USB device when it is in use (reading or writing):

When you plug in a USB drive, you give your PC free access to write and read data from it and some of that is cached.

Caching does not write the data directly into the USB device, but instead keeping the information in your PC’s memory i.e., RAM. If you were to pull off the USB drive out of your PC before this information is writing is complete, or while its being written, you will end up with a corrupted file.

But, Windows automatically disables caching on USB connected devices  unless you specifically say that you want it to be enabled. Most of the times, you don’t have to click the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ button, as long as you are not writing or reading anything from the device.

The button is an extra level of security provided to keep your files from being destroyed.

if you do so, your files will close correctly, hence preserving data, pointers and file size indicators with their exact data. While writing to disk the computer doesn’t always, “flush” a buffer and only a part of the data may be written. Using the proper procedure will assure that the pointers and hence data are in good shape.

Second reason

Flash drives actually need a stable power for ~0.25 seconds after a write command is executed. This is a fundamental physical problem, because of random factors, some writes may leave a logical 1 bit in a electrical 0.72 state. The fix here is easy: just rewrite the bit, perhaps a few times. Eventually it will stick.

If you’re really unlucky, the bit falling over will be in a filesystem table and corrupt e.g. an entire directory.

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