Safely eject usb in metro ui???

[ScottyS]

That might depend on the timing and possibly updating the Master File Table at that precise moment. ...

I suppose that if this is in progress removing it the right way gives the message "cannot remove such-and-such" as it is in use?

This raises a question I've had, is there a problem unplugging USB drives while in standby or hibernate in terms of their not being there when it comes out of sleep? I've always done a shut down before unplugging my USB hub (I have 3 USB drive; 2 are USB3, I don't know about the 3rd as it is older, ? USB2). Is shut down unnecessary, can I just yank it while in standby?

 

[GreyFox7]

I suppose that if this is in progress removing it the right way gives the message "cannot remove such-and-such" as it is in use?

This raises a question I've had, is there a problem unplugging USB drives while in standby or hibernate in terms of their not being there when it comes out of sleep? I've always done a shut down before unplugging my USB hub (I have 3 USB drive; 2 are USB3, I don't know about the 3rd as it is older, ? USB2). Is shut down unnecessary, can I just yank it while in standby?

I would not think that to be a problem, we should be entering standby/sleep/hibernation from a quiescent state after some period of idle time, all disk operations from even any background processes should be properly paused or suspended.

However if you had applications with open files they may be somewhat disturbed upon reactivating without their drive available but even then a robust app would recover while a less robust app would likely hang or terminate.

 

[ScottyS]

I would not think that to be a problem, we should be entering standby/sleep/hibernation from a quiescent state after some period of idle time, all disk operations from even any background processes should be properly paused or suspended. ...

I often press a sleep button on my wireless USB keyboard, but I imagine Windows finishes what is going on in background in connected standby. My drives are mainly for backup and storeage, with most documents I open being on the SP3 SSD or OneDrive. I should try some experiments. PDFs in Adobe Reader vs. Foxit, Office docs, where Office opens a draft temp file locally, etc. Yeah, an experiment. What could go wrong? (famous last words).

 

[gangolfus]

You do..otherwise you increase the risk of losing data...

I don't think this has been true since Windows XP.

It was originally an issue because writes to external media were sloooooow.... so Windows would write a file to cache, tell you it had transferred, then transfer the file from cache to the media in the background. So if you pulled the external media from the computer before the file had written from the cache to the media, you would corrupt the files since they hadn't actually yet transferred. Safely removing hardware would ensure all writes were finished then tell you it was safe to remove the media. Windows no longer uses Delayed Write Caching (google for more info).