"safely remove" external hard drives

anyone know for sure if it is actually necessary to "safely remove" your external hard drive in vista? is it actually going to cause problems if I simply pull the plug? (assuming of course data is not being transferred/read at the time). its kind of annoying to have to do this every time I want to move the laptop.

 

As long as nothing is being written to the drive, you can unplug it without window's blessing.

 

There are sidebar gadgets for it, but I have found that even when you *think* there is no activity, you may end up screwing something up. I have had a couple accidents with this where the was some background program saving something and I had some minor corruption. It may be annoying, but why sacrifice your data's security? You can always ensure the drive is set to "Quick Removal" as opposed to "Optimal Performance"...

 

Yea, it would be safest to use the safely remove option just to make sure that nothing bad happens, but I tend to be too lazy to go through everything.

I just make sure that everything that I have on there that I have jsut worked with has been saved properly and that should something get corrupted, it wouldn't be the end of the world for me.

 

I've once plugged it after a file transfer (the transfer screen was long gone), but still the file became corrupt. So yeah, there can be something going on.

Though, it seems windows never lets me unplug it safely, always says that the drive is being used when im really sure its not, so I don't bother with it.

 

In case anyone doesn't know why the option exists:

Some years ago Windows became a bit smarter about how it handled file transfers, and they realized that overall, operations could be done faster if they didn't directly do what was being asked on the surface. As such, when you 'save' something, move files, or append a log the OS may just store the change in memory and not actually do such. This might happen if for example it decides that one operation is more important then another. If your transferring 4GBs of movies onto an SD card, you don't want to block the harddrive from accessing the data that a program needs to complete a newly request action. Thus the system might pause the transfer to do the new action. Sometimes data just doesn't get finished saving; or, more commonly a user removes the drive wile a file is only partially transferred.

When you click 'safely remove' the OS completes all the operations to the drive and then blocks new requests, then tells you its safe to remove. Thus there can't be any problems. This is also what the 'quick removal' vs 'performence' option is tell you about. The quick removal doesn't allow this, and finishes as soon as possible. The performance option lets things wait longer. This is the same problem with hard shutdowns. Data may not have been saved, where on a soft shutdown the OS blocks new requests so there are no partially written files.

 

USB viruses are very common now, I was so annoyed with that win32 and autorun.inf worm/trojan that even screwed up my brother's Vista OSed Laptop.
I don't really rely much on external storage devices because of this..