Now I’ve heard of ejecting a CD but I always thought that all you had to do with a USB flash drive was simply yank it out of the side of your laptop. Apparently that is a mistake. Ejecting it first avoids losing precious data.

Windows vs. Other Computers

Windows doesn’t have a problem with this but various other laptops advise you to ‘eject’ your USB flash drives before actually disconnecting it. You may not even notice an ejection option if you run with windows. There are actually two ways to look at this. Technically, the object has been saved in the data that has been placed on the USB drive; it’s sort of an insurance policy. In the system tray there should be an icon that says ‘safely remove hardware’; by choosing your drive from that list you should be able to ‘eject’ your USB flash drive before removing it. However, there’s more to the entire equation than just that.

The Rest of the Story

Apparently in some mysterious way that only Windows understands, it somehow knows that we humans tend to disconnect things without actually properly ejecting them on the computer first. It takes this into consideration and therefore does not make you officially eject the USB drive before actually removing it. Linux and Mac on the other hand, fully expect you to eject the USB flash drive before actually removing it. By yanking out the USB flash drive while it is actively being written will corrupt the data; which can also be corrupted even if it is not being written the time of removal. By requesting to eject the USB flash drive you are telling the computer that it must finish whatever it is doing in order for you to keep your data safe.

The bottom line is that formally ejecting your USB drive before removing it simply assures you that your data will be kept safe.