why doesn't OS X Auto eject a usb thumb drive

im a newly converted from windows and i was wondering if there is a way to make os x always ready to eject USB Devices and not have to do it manually every time

thanks

 

I'm confused. It doesn't know when you want to eject it, And the last time I used Windows it didn't either. If it was always read to be ejected you would never be able to use it.

 

in windows 7 a usb device is always ready to be used and always ready to be removed in os x if you unplug a usb device it says it wasn't properly ejected and can damage it

 

Well, yeah, if you are in the middle of transferring files and you pull out the drive it could get damaged or corrupted, Not sure how Windows get's around this. Maybe they just don't show a message like they use to? Other wise I wouldn't worry about ejecting it. There might be a away to disable the notice with some terminal command.

 

Windows just doesn't show up a warning. If you pull out a pen drive while writing to it in Windows, you greatly risk damaging the drive just as much as if you did the same in OS X.

 

funny.. I eject my USB drives in Windows 7... I've never tried to do it otherwise though cuz its not very smart to do. Would be pretty stupid on Microsoft's part to make it suppress any warnings.... maybe if it has been accessed in the last minute it auto unmounts, and is ready at any time to remount if accessed? But theres no way it can just be ready all the time and be usable.

 

Windows 7 has two modes for transfering: hotpluggable and cached mode.
For hot pluggable mode, you can indeed unplug a flashdrive while making a file transfer. A reminder will pop up telling you to plug your flash drive back in to continue transferring if unplugged during a transfer. If you ignore the warning, the file simply won't exist on the drive. NTFS file format supports hot plugging. No files on the flash drive will be corrupted when hotplugged in this mode.

For cached mode, you'll need to "safely remove" the flash drive sometime. When transferring a file, the data is cached, then transferred into the flash drive. When unplugged during a transfer, some parts of the data inside the cache will be lost, however, windows will show you a warning to plug back the drive to continue transferring. Majority of the time, the errors created by unplugging accidentally will be fixed by the NTFS file format automatically. For some rare instances, windows will pop up a "fix" menu when you plug in the drive next time. Most of them, you can still unplug the flash drive without "safely remove" and it'll still be perfectly fine.

 

Windows no longer requires a USB drive to be ejected unless you're caching to the drive or something. an option that would have to be set manually. otherwise, you can always snatch a USB device off.

a small annoyance in OSX, but I can live with it.

+1 more to Windows, I guess.

 

reduced performance of the USB drive in windows if you want to safely remove the drive without first ejecting it. they are slow enough as is. I always manually eject

*that sounded dirty

 

It'll do you good to eject the drive properly from both platforms as there can be problems reading between platforms if you were to eject a drive without safely removing it.


Windows does not give any warnings as it allows the quick eject to have the drive ready to be read by another windows computer, however, see what happens when you plug it into an OSX system, big error message about making sure to safely remove it from a windows computer before using it on OSX.

 

sooo true , and especially between Windows and Linux , what i hate about OSX & windows that sometimes they keep telling me that usb is used ( while not telling me what is using it ) , and i always check that all file browsers are closed , this leaves me with ejecting the flash drive the hard way

 

In windows 7, explorer takes care of closing the file browsers and most of other applications when ejecting the flash drive.

 

What?

USB drives are not slow. It's your hard drive that's the bottle neck in a USB file transfer.

 

It depends. Different usb drives have different speeds. It varies depending on the manufacturer.

 

interesting all this time on win7 I've been manually ejecting. It used to be really slow in XP but a few slower clicks in 7. Geess I can just yank it out when I'm done now. As for OSX, no biggy though.

 

Be that as it may, a slower USB drive is more likely to read/write faster than your traditional HDD.

 

That's totally untrue unless you're writing billions of single 1kb files to different parts of the hdd at the same time. For writing regular files like movies, a standard hdd will sustain 30MB/s which is faster than 99% of the flash drives. If your hdd is connected via e-sata, the difference will be even greater. Traditional hdd can be more than 10x faster than a slower usb drive.

 

So speed of the transfer ultimately depends on both the HDD and the USB Flash Drive

 

very much so, there are a very wide difference in transfer rates on both devices. my high end Corsair flash drives will read/write over 8 times faster than some of the generic stuff I have gotten from BB.

and old 4200RPM hard drives get killed by the high end 5400's and the 7200 RPM drives.

You have to know what all you are dealing with in hardware and software as your transfer rate depends on the SLOWEST link in the chain, ( HDD to Drive controller to bus to USB controller to flash device ) software comes into play for controlling and optimizing the hardware that is in use.