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Windows "safely remove device" thingie

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jgpaiva:
Anyone know this: ?
Do you actually use it?

I have a few doubts about this. There has been a time where i'd be very cautious about it, but eventually gave up when i found out that using it would frequently restart the connection on all USB ports and, as my modem was USB at the time, it'd make my internet connection drop everytime i "safelly removed" something.

Although i do understand that it is meant to avoid having processes writing or reading from the usb disk when it is unpluggled, i don't think that not using it does that much damage. I own an external USB hdd, and although i'm very cautious not to unplug it when i'm working in it, i never "safely remove" it, also because, for some reason, that thing only works when i "safely remove" that disk twice, since the first time it always fails for some stupid reason.

So.. What's your opinion on this?

f0dder:
I use it when I need to remove a device, all the time, period. If you don't do this, you risk filesystem cache not being flushed, device not being unmounted cleanly, and filesystem corruption as a result. If you have your devices set as "optimize for quick removal" (which means slow speed) the risk of damage is a lot smaller, but you'll suffer from bad speed.

And yeah, sometimes the device will be in use even though it appearantly makes no sense... even an application having it's "current working directory" set to a location on the external disk will cause this, no files have to be open.

TucknDar:
I use it for my external hdd (rarely though, as it's connected pretty much 24/7) and my iPod, but not for my thumbdrive. I'm planning on buying a better thumbdrive with more space (currently 128mb :o ) which I'll be running a few apps on, and I'll probably use the safely remove-option when I get that.

CWuestefeld:
I follow the rules almost always. The exception is when it tells me it can't stop the device, which I guess is because some badly-behaved program is still pointing to it as the default directory after a File|Save or something.

A recent article on the Langa List http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070405#langa0 points out other ugly problems that can occur when you break the rules. I've never experienced these, though.
Have you ever had Windows show you a device — perhaps a USB drive or other removable device — that's no longer connected to your system? When this happens, you can run into trouble if software tries to access the phantom device.

Or, because the nonexistent device is still consuming a drive letter assignment and/or other resources, you may have problems when you add additional devices that need the already-assigned resources. I've seen some cases where people were running out of drive letters because their systems were maintaining a whole flock of phantom drives! ...

Phantom devices can appear for any number of reasons. Perhaps the most common reason is a shutdown error with a removable drive...
--- End quote ---

gjehle:
oops, just found the proper place to post, here we go:

Off topic a bit...
The oh-so-damn-useful unplug-stuff thingie (which i never use).
-jgpaiva (April 12, 2007, 07:24 PM)
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Your referring to the Safely Remove Hardware icon. Unless you have a "permanent" thing like an external drive or DVD drive that you never turn off or unplug, you actually should be using this lol...
-wreckedcarzz (April 12, 2007, 09:36 PM)
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Actually, good idea. I'll start a new thread asking for more info on that :)
-jgpaiva (April 13, 2007, 06:18 AM)
--- End quote ---


the thing i think this 'unplug thingy' does is making sure the filesystem is sync, in 99.9999% a very good idea.
virtually all filesystems that are used in 'normal' scenarios use some kind of buffer at some point (esp when writing to the device, which most of the time is a fire-and-forget task (unlike reading which has to respond with data asap)).
on linux and unix there's 'fsync' (good idea to use if you're creating a initrd image via loopback device), on windows you just click 'remove device', i pretty sure it does the same thing, make sure all data is consistent and buffers are cleared.

depending on the device (type of filesystem) it is more or less likely that you'll corrupt it by unplugging.
if there hasn't been any writing access to the device over the last few seconds it is also unlikely that there's still something in the buffer (if your I/O scheduler was idle for some time)
still.. chances remain..

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