mac suceptible to corrupt thumb drives by removal without unmounting?

Hey -- so I'm new to the OSX community.
Quick question. I just put in a thumb drive, and pulled it out. OS X prompted me I may have corrupted the filesystem or whatever, but I just shrugged it off since I did it on my PC ALLLL the time with no problems.

Anyway I plugged it into a PC and it turns out I ruined the USB drive -- will need to reformat it before it can be used again.

That being said, is OS X really sensitive to unmounting external hard drives or maybe just thumb drives in particular?

thanks

 

If you had a file from that drive open on an app or something that may have caused it. But really, it's just luck. I have removed a cheapo thumbdrive of mine many many times without corruption on both Os X and Windows. You should always unmount though, since corruption is possible, and can occur randomly (both on Windows and Mac, plus unmounting is really easy... just press the eject button next to the drive in the finder).

 

That'd be just luck, if you ask me. I've pulled my flash drive out without ejecting it before, and nothing happened. I try not to though.

 

This may seem like a stupid question, but what does the actual UNMOUNTING process do?

I always eject my drives, but I've always wondered why I do it >.>

 

It stops your computer from reading data from it. The reason it can get corrupt is your PC is reading data from it, and through that you pull it out. Unmounting insures your PC stops reading it so you don't risk corruption.

 

writing actually. if its just reading from it, that won't hurt it, but if it is writing to it that can screw it up. Also, with the journaled file system, it may not have finished writing stuff to it, even if it looks inactive. ejecting makes sure that all data transfer is finished.

 

If you don't eject it properly in both windows and osx there is a chance that your computer may be doing something with the drive that causes it to become corrupted.