Hey guys, pardon me if this is a n00b question, but I just got a flash drive, and do I have to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray, or can I just pull the drive out of the USB port?
thx

hey

It is not nessesary to use the safley remove hardware icon, but I would highley recomend it. A USB jump drive works just like a hard drive. Once the drive has been initialized if it is not shut down properly before removal it is rough on the drive. It can easily cause early failure of the drive.

Not as much with Flash Memory, it's worse to unplug a actual hard drive that way.

As long as you have disabled write caching I think you should be OK, but it's always better safe then sorry....

If you just want to pull it out then you can, just close all files and folders from the drive before you pull it out. Then it should do no significant harm.

I always use "Safely Remove Hardware" just to be safe. It doesn't have to be a tedious/lengthy task either, there's in fact a great time difference between left/right clicking the icon.

If you right click the icon, you need to select your device then click stop.

If you left click it, you just simply select it and it's much faster, so it only takes you about two seconds extra to "safely remove the hardware" than if you just pull it out.

Just insert the device and then just unsert it when you're finish. I see guys at work do that MS unplug thing but I told them you don't have to do that anymore..

Windows XP has write caching disabled by default for USB devices. So theoretically, when there is no proram writing to the drive, it is OK to just unplug it in Windows XP.

It is nicer to use the safe removal icon though. You may know your own computer, but some machines may have some background processes that may be writing on the USB device or someone may have configured their XP to enable write caching for their USB device. I do this when I have to do some very intensive work with my flash drive - with cache things go faster and with less actual writing to the device, it hopefully lasts longer.

You can do following thing, so that you don't need to safely remove hardware everytime.

-Right click on the device (ie. a removable hard disk drive)
-Properties
-Hardware
-You choose the device
-Properties
-Policies
-Optimize for quick removal

A useful first post GJ!