| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 57522 | 2005-05-05 05:39:00 | Flash Drive - Safe to Remove. | Scouse (83) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 352224 | 2005-05-05 05:39:00 | Hi Folks. I have a couple of small flash drives, an Iomega and a wee thing like a Swiss army knife. Whenever they are used they place a small "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on the task bar near the clock. Clicking on this gets a go-ahead to "Safely Remove USB Device" message. I could vaguely understand the need for this type of action in DOS but I would have thought XP's plug and play would not need to give approval for the removal of the flash drive. Any comment/advice? Thanks. ;) | Scouse (83) | ||
| 352225 | 2005-05-05 05:44:00 | Well I have the same thing with this card reader on my taskbar. It's a good idea to use it, or if the icon is in My computer, highlight it and select eject. If you're not careful it may get corrupted, if u unplug it, before it finishes writing data to it. Your flash drive may get recognised as a USB Mass Storage Device. The same as this 7-1 card reader, I use here. |
Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 352226 | 2005-05-05 05:59:00 | It simply ensures that the Windows file buffer is flushed and that all files really are written to the device, and not still "pending" I admit that I seldom use it, but if the file is "really important" I do use it. Only been caught once, and it actually warned me that the file may be corrupt when I snatched it away before Windows was ready to let me have it. It was several seconds after the write was finished, or so I thought. |
godfather (25) | ||
| 352227 | 2005-05-05 06:19:00 | Apart from pulling the device during the write (which most people wouldn't do) the major risk is that the directory is not necessarily written immediately. It is maintained in memory, and needs to be updated (twice for each file). This might not be done at a high priority if the CPU is needed for other things. The final directory is marked as "dirty" (changed), and will be written the next time the OS looks. Using the icon forces it to be written. | Graham L (2) | ||
| 352228 | 2005-05-05 08:15:00 | Speedy, GF & Graham.... many thanks. I've been getting fairly casual and just ignoring it. | Scouse (83) | ||
| 352229 | 2005-05-05 08:27:00 | I've hardly ever used | wotz (335) | ||
| 1 | |||||