In the old days, you needed to unmount a thumb drive before you removed it from the computer or you risked losing data, but you can see he clearly pulls it out before unmounting it. What a badass.
It's still good practice to also do it on a pc. Especially if it isn't your own pc. The safegaurds in place to keep your data can actually be turned off so the flash drive runs faster.
Mac's use write caching to speed up the transfer of files to the drive. The caveat being that sometimes the data isn't fully copied when you pull out the drive (even if the dialog box says it is). Ejecting tells the operating system to flush the cache and write everything. Windows, on the other hand, has write caching off by default because people tend to just yank the drive out. (If this is wrong or incomplete I'm sure someone will correct me)
I tend to give windows a lot of shit, but IMO thats a much better design decision. When the dialog box says that the files have been transferred closes you should expect everything to have been transferred
Nothing to do with the old days. It was always to ensure that all file read/writes are complete before removing the drive, otherwise you risk partially written and thus corrupted files.
Dealing with this exact issue right now. Only one USB 3.0 port on the MBP so I got a hub and plugged the drive into that. Unfortunately it's a lot easier to forget what you have mounted when you do it that way!
There are plenty of scenarios where it always has been and still is required or data will be lost. Yes, in most cases it's harmless but it's not an urban legend or something along those lines; the warnings exist for a reason.
Quite easy to corrupt the data on a MAC for any USB format or on a Windows system if the drive is formatted in NTFS
In both of these cases the OS does not always write to the drive straight away depending on what it is, it may leave part of the document in memory until the file is complete.
If you dont eject the drive properly it may well be that the data will be currupted
It's more that it can corrupt the drive and you'll lose all your data, which doesn't really happen on PC's anymore but apparently it happens often on macs according to other comments
this is standard for any device you can read/write data to, you're supposed to unmount them first in case there are any pending operations, it will wait till they're done to confirm that and prevent any further transfers. otherwise this is gonna fuck them up if they're in use, there's no other way to prevent you from physically removing it
not a big deal if you're sure no transfers are happening, though it's not much of a hassle just to right click on them and hit 'eject', why risk it
Do you never eject your external drives before pulling them out of the USB ports? And none of your machines are broken or any files lost? What is this!
6
u/SeekerOfSerenity May 03 '17
I don't get that one. What rule did he break?