What do we exactly achieve by safely ejecting the USB?

Do We Achieve Anything By Safely Ejecting The USB?

Let's Take A Quick Look At A History Of USB

A USB stands for Universal Serial Bus.USB is a storage medium which is presently available in various types and memory sizes.Let's go back in the time when there was no USB available.

If you were using the computer anytime before the dawn of the USB in Pentium and Pentium II eras you already know that connecting anything to the computer required any one of the large variety of the ports.Maybe you need a PS/2 connector or a serial port. A keyboard? PS/2 again, maybe the Apple Desktop Bus, or a DIN connector.Connecting joysticks required game ports which were commonly found on dedicated sound cards in the 90's.USB also made it easy connecting to the Wi-Fi adapters.The release of USB 2.0 resulted in the death of floppy disks.

In older days there was a process of physically "mount" and "unmount" storage media. mount simply means the information that is to read and written must be organized and knowledge of this must be available to the operating system(Let's not go too much in the detail of mounting and unmounting as it's a separate topic by itself).The physical act of mounting a tape or a disk pack, triggered some mechanical switch to detect the presence or absence of media. Once the mechanism was engaged, the software could start to use the media (a "soft mount."). Some media even had a mechanical interlock to prevent media from being ejected or removed until the software processes using the media released the lock.

Modern USB

There is no mechanical interlock in a USB connection to coordinate the hard and soft mount.The user can decide to rip the USB from the under Operating System at any time and the running(underlying) program will get freaked out about the sudden loss of the data. 

Your program most probably will be like "Hey man! Seriously? I was using that"

Symptoms include corrupted file systems, loss of data , hanging computers requiring reboot.

Your PC needs to get rebooted as OS needs to perform  File System Check that is to  ensure  all file systems are perfect and not corrupted. 

Life Is too Short To Safely Remove The Disk

However, Safe Removal does a number of important things and is, in fact, the only assured safe way to remove a disk.  

A safe removal does a few things:

• It flushes all active writes to disk.
• It alerts all programs (that know how to be alerted) that the disk is going away, and to take appropriate action.
• It alerts the user when programs have failed to take action, and still are holding files open.

 You probably don't need it most of the time, but it is a good habit to have since data loss sucks.So next time you better take your time to safely remove the disk 

Thank you for reading the blog and don't forget to Smile More :)