When do you safely remove a device? Some users put caution to the wind and yank out any device, while others perform religious rituals every time. Here are some tips and guidelines for practicing safe drive removal.
Removable storage has been around as long as the personal computer and safely removing or “ejecting” drives is something that OS X and Linux users are very familiar with. Whenever an external storage device is plugged into those operating system it becomes mounted to a location, and if you just pull it out without warning your OS, typically you receive a nasty warning saying you may have just lost all your data.
In Windows, however, drive mounting is different. It doesn’t always require you to safely remove a device and rarely does it send out nastygram popups when you remove a device without warning. At most, you may get a popup the next time you plug in the device asking you to scan and fix the drive.
So how can you know when you should eject a drive before unplugging it? Here are some never, always, and sometimes situations to consider.
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