Storage Solutions [Explained] How to safely remove pen drive without ejecting

[GadVeen]

Introduction:

• How many times you have come across the situation where you plug in your USB drive and see a notification informing your drive is corrupted and it needs to be repaired?
• In this post we will see how we can change the default behavior to avoid this situation.

Background:

• Why does this happen? OS uses the concept called Write Caching to improve the performance of write operations.
• It basically buffers the write requests and flushes them at one shot in periodic intervals.
• It also depends upon OS. Linux and Mac mostly uses write cache.
• Windows most of the time disables Write Cache in portable devices.

Solution:

• Disable Write Cache for pen drive by unchecking write cache.

Settings:

• Right click pen drive (say F:\) -> Properties -> Hardware -> Properties -> Policies -> Quick Removal (check this option)
• 

Disadvantages:

• Performance will be hit very lightly. But the convenience of removing pen drive without eject is worth the slight performance degrade.
• Remember if there are some applications still holding reference, it might cause this issue

Whats best?

• If Linux or Mac, always eject.
• If Windows, if the file is an important one, then eject, else remove directly.
• Remember, USB drives are temporary storage.