Aqua Taskforce

polycat33 wrote on August 30, 2008, 2:19am

Windows users are surprised they have to eject a thumb drive from a mac? Because you're supposed to eject it in Windows too. Of course you don't HAVE to, it's not like it's stuck in there, so on either OS you could totally just take it out, it'll probably just tell you that you shouldn't have because you could have damaged something.

If taking it out without ejecting doesn't have a chance of damaging it at all, then I'm all for this.

theo.dore wrote on August 30, 2008, 11:05am

indeed - Windows-users actually need to locate a tiny "safely remove hardware" icon in the system bar, and then chose to eject a drive based solely on it's drive letter - no logical disk name. I say: that's worse

divinenephron wrote on August 30, 2008, 2:44pm

You have to "eject" any drive before physically removing it in any operating system.
The operating system has to unmount the filesystem first. The filesystem is the way that the files are stored on the drive. Unmounting involves doing many things such as making sure that there is nothing more to be written to the drive, making sure the list of where the data is is complete.
If you just remove it there is a chance that data that has not been written yet will be lost, you damage the list of where the files are (also called "corrupting the filesystem") and lose all of the data on the drive, or you could cause your computer to crash when it thinks "bugger where did that disk go."
The last two won't happen most of the time because most filesystems and operating systems are written to stop them, but unless you know how to get an OS to read our mind, there is no way to remove the necessity of telling the OS when we want to remove a drive.

Watchful wrote on August 30, 2008, 3:31pm

This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen on this site. As mentioned in the above comments, Windows users are SUPPOSED to eject (Safely Remove in Windows parlance) external storage devices before just yanking them out of the ports because of the potential for damage to the file system. However I find that 50% of the time Windows refuses to "safely remove" the devices telling me that it cannot be stopped. The only time this is true on the Mac is if there "really is" something going on with the device.

Windows makes it harder to eject devices, and then doesn't warn you that you have improperly ejected it so that you do it right the next time.

I have demoted this hint!

jasper wrote on September 1, 2008, 9:32pm

Windows just solves this problem on a dumb way. At least MacOS tells you what the consequences could have been when you unplug a drive without ejecting it, Windows just let's you lose data if you forget about it. Macs are aware.

purefusion wrote on September 17, 2008, 6:19pm

I've never had a problem simply removing usb gear on windows. Same thing on the mac. But for those who feel this is dumb, I have a proposition:

Whenever a drive is connected, it has the ability to be removed any time, at which point if there IS actually some action going on, the machine can simply pause mid-transfer, notify the person to reinsert the drive so it can finish. Perhaps too, an option to continue later, and if the files were being transferred in a clean, read-only write-minimally way, there wouldn't be too many issues in doing this. Otherwise yanks that sucker and you're free to go!

Would you call that a smart USB system?

dehetepappie wrote on January 3, 2009, 2:55pm

On Windows, USB drives are automatically mounted as "quick remove" devices, and no deferred writes/caching takes place. This means you can indeed yank out USB sticks with no consequences, although with USB-attached hard drives who do their own on-board caching this might not be 100% reliable.