do you "eject" USB flash drives before you unplug them?

[Mr Downtown]

How do you eject a thumb drive in XP?

[Racer X]

Mr Downtown wrote:
How do you eject a thumb drive in XP?

there is a little green icon in the lower right of most XP screens that is for disconnecting external devices. Anything like a removeable second drive in a laptop, thumb drive, FW drive, USB drive, flash card, PC wireless card or modem card, etc will be on the little pop up list. If you have a FW card for example, you can unmount the drive, but leave the PC FW card active. You could "eject" a FW card with a mounted drive plugged in, but that is probably the same as yanking the cable on the drive.

[Racer X]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=thermarest]
Sometimes if I'm lazy and I know there is no read/write going on I'll just pull it out.

And how would you know that? lots of thumb drives have little activity lights. All of mine do, and I have at least 4 different brands. When plugged in they light up, and when transfering data, they flash.

[JoeH]

Racer X wrote:
[quote=Article Accelerator]
[quote=thermarest]
Sometimes if I'm lazy and I know there is no read/write going on I'll just pull it out.

And how would you know that? lots of thumb drives have little activity lights. All of mine do, and I have at least 4 different brands. When plugged in they light up, and when transfering data, they flash.
But if they have not transferred the last bit of data, the light will be off and the directory or file may end up corrupted. Usually. if you have not seen the light flashing for a few minutes you are safe. But not always even then.

[Jimmypoo]

The only one I know of that can repair itself is the SANSA MP3 player ----

On the Mac, you eject it, but give it 1/4 of a second more, and it remounts itself! So, you have to time
it so you eject and grab it within about 1 second. If you miss it (regardless) the database is "rebuilt"
every time the unit is powered on - and since it just went from a Charging to None situation as well,
it rebuilds itself.

I'm sure that is the one way it has saved itself.

The one time the data was blown, there is a reset button that causes a more root level rebuild, and the
data re-appears.

All this, and it takes Micro SDs for expansion, has FM (+ record) plus voice record, in typical USB drive
housing, and a backlit monochrome display as well.

[Racer X]

heretic!

[Jimmypoo]

It was $20 refurb. I wasn't going to pass that up. FM--- if it isn't digital, then I'm just amazed by it, as it sounds (noise, etc) like XM, etc.

[guitarist]

Reveals that we are a majority "Windows" forum...no surprise