Once I was saving an almost-finished school paper to my USB and my bro yanked it out cause he needed it for something. -I now have one less brother.- I use Google Drive now.
Same problem, honestly i just say screw it and turn my computer off then unplug it. I only use my external hard drive for extra video games so unless i'm playing them i don't need it to be plugged in
@@aceinyoface96 I use my main drive for games and a Seagate backup drive for HD movies. After I buy a movie on Blu-Ray or through Vudu, I like to have have a torrented copy that I can play on my Android or Blu-Ray player through the USB drive. I copy a movie or two to my micro SD card at a time to watch on the bus or something so I don't have to worry about buying a separate device. Vudu works just fine with Android, but for Blu-ray discs that don't have that option, it's my preferred method.
This is a common problem. The files have all been closed but windows doesn't know it. So it is being conservative. The problem comes from the delayed write capability where something is stored in memory and later written to the USB. Windows can ASK the USB to store the file. Unless it gets acknowledgment how can it know if its request has been honoured?
A highschool teacher of mine freaked out on me because I didn't eject my USB and a warning message popped up. She thought I'd just destroyed the classroom's iMac.
when you press "shift" button continueosly you get a popup telling you can activate disabled people mode. it happened in school and they thought i "LET" a virus come in (there was no internet).
R3dp055um It's not their lack of knowledge that bothers me, but their inability to accept the fact that the student might be correct and to learn and move forward.
That light might be a power light ejecting makes sure no programs are currently writing or reading from that flash drive so you can pull it out without interrupting anything
I thought this comment was meant as a joke. Looks like it's not, in that case, what do you do with those _no light_ usbs? Obviously eject from the system first and when the system says it's ok, physically pull it out
Last time I looked the modern equivalent of the update daemon to flush dirty buffer cache pages still operates every 10s, so the traditional sh -c "sync; sync" wouldn't really help. What if your USB is erasing pages, wear levelling or re-writing them? Don't you think telling it to go offline anticipating power loss is safer?
@@RobBCactive it's safer but to just resolve write caching e.g. on a network drive or a USB 'sync' will do the job. Though to just take it 'offline' etc. is still better for USB.
I just wonder, why this friend hasn't had ANY copy of his thesis on any other device? I saved my master thesis during writing on two external hard drives, one USB drive and the internal drive, as well as I had it uploaded into Google Drive ;)
Think of not ejecting your USB drive as not closing a book when you put it on the bookshelf. You can do it a few time and the book is still readable, but if you shove an open book into a bookshelf enough times, you'll start tearing pages up, making it unreadable.
it has...its called "shutdown" button. There's a difference between hard drives and flash drives. Hard drive is basically a disk, which cant be corrupt easily and flash drives data are stored in a chip which can be at risk on corrupting your data.
The real answer is it's not. As long as you've completed your write cycle, just pull the bitch out. Anyone who thinks you need to eject a usb drive before you remove it doesn't have a clue how they work.
Steven Mactavish I'm positive that's not why it happened. Think about how many devices don't even have an eject option. Data has been getting corrupted long before SD cards and USB ports. Sometimes factory defects, sometimes user error, sometimes even poor data management by the OS. Reguardless, if you are not currently writing data to the device there is nothing unplugging it can possibly do to it.
also you never know if some program isn't accessing your USB drive for some reason WHILE you pull it out ... things like that can happen. (especially with newer software that likes to scan drives to import new photos, and so on)
I've been lucky that I've never had files destroyed or lost by not ejecting first, but now I know, I'm definitely taking the time to eject. Thank you for educating me!
I learned the hard way in middle school about just pulling out a USB drive and had it corrupted. When I was in high school, before we got Google Docs that multiple people could edit on, we would get together in groups with multiple people with several laptops and one USB that we would have on Word doc on, edit it with our part, and pass it on to the next person. In my group we had to use my personal USB drive and I was mortified. I made my classmates eject my drive every time before pulling it out and they would get all huffy and annoyed and say it didn't matter. The only way I got them to listen was to tell them that I was using my personal drive and that whomever messed it up would have to buy me a new one and that we would lose our project and have to start again.
Here's another one for the list: Don't throw shit at an armed man. (Niven's 1st law) [Corrollary: Don't stand next to someone who's throwing shit at an armed man.]
True story, shortly after I started working at an MSP my boss cackled when I asked if he was going to use the eject function before disconnecting a USB hard drive. That hard drive literally lost its partition table.
i always try to eject and Windows then usually says no. so i go to task manager and restart Explorer, which sometimes frees the drive from Windows' clutches. if it still refuses to let it go i just disconnect the drive anyway because goddammit Windows, at least fucking tell me what you're doing with the drive that's so important
Valfaun If you eject the USB in Explorer then it works better than using the system tray icon. I find that I have to click eject twice if I use the system tray, but it works instantly in Explorer.
@@MichaelWarne Which part of "most" did you not get? Plus if you are going in to th 128 GB territory then you might as well just buy an external hard drive.
my dad is the most tech savvy person in my family so, of course, when he finished modding my 2ds sd card and i finished editing my acnl save, he ejected and waited for the "safe to remove" prompt before removing the sd card and inserting it back into my 2ds (my 2ds is pretty much my life now so of course we didn't want to run the risk of data corruption even though my dad did create a folder on his desktop and copy-pasted everything on the sd card into it)
I lost a file 15 years ago and had to get up and walk 10 steps back to the other computer to copy it onto the drive again, that is 5 minutes of my life I will never get back, you cannot put a price on that, I always make sure to eject my USB flash drives.
So let's assume that the general user ejects a USB drive from their PC at least 2 or 3 times per day, so that's 6 seconds per day (this will then factor in days where the USB drive is not used I would think). Now there's 7 days per week so that makes it 42 seconds of ejecting per week, and 52 weeks in a year bringing us to a total of 2184 seconds per year (or 36 minutes and 24 seconds). Let's assume that the average user starts using USB drives at around age 5 and the typical life expectancy is around 75-80 (could be higher but I'm making assumptions). So that's about 70-75 years of using USB drives, at 2184 seconds per year of ejecting, the average time spent in a lifetime ejecting USB drives amounts to about 152880 - 163800 seconds. That's roughly between 1day 18hours 28minutes and 1day 21hours 30minutes. So, when you think about it, you waste almost 2 days of your entire life ejecting USB drives 😂😂
You guys are so helpful. I'm currently studying for my A+ exam and every time I have some stupid question ab a specific topic, you have a video about it. Thankyou all so much for such great content
Typing a research paper for my Physician Assistant program my computer died and upon turning back on the blue screen of death came up. After rebooting my entire 11 page masterpiece was gone! Crying I called my professor at 12 am and she basically said, “sucks to suck, can’t prove you’re not lying”. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS SAVE THINGS PROPERLY AFTER EACH PARAGRAPH!!!
Always use safe eject for external hard drives because they should stop spinning before power cuts off. If you think just pulling USB flash drive out is safe, you can do it, but I always use safe eject for any external storage. In macOS, safe ejection is easier than in Windows.
Always do it. I always ejected my drives, until one day, my computer was being stupid, and I pulled it out without ejecting it. That was the only time I had done that, and that one time I _did_ do it, it corrupted my entire flash drive with like 7 years worth of stuff, and made it completely unusable. I was told to use some programme to recover scraps of files, but that just returned corrupted versions of the files, and even after formatting the drive, it was still completely unusable. I did it ONCE. And that one time I did it, it corrupted everything. So never think, "oh, it'll be fine just this once.".
@Frank Winkhorst, yeah, luckily, I had done a backup about a month earlier, but I still lost everything I had done in that month. I now do it once a week, or after I do anything really important.
The worst time to do it is when your computer "is being stupid." If your computer is saying "You can't eject this. It's still in use.", you *really* can't just take it out.
Let someone with this defect comment before you go on a holy crusade. While I am all up for accessibility, there is definitely a upper limit we are reaching with these sort of arguments. We can't realistically accomodate for every physical handicap or political opinion in our daily lives neither should we have to. It is upto epileptic person to lower their brightness or some other solution.
@@rixy560 This is a ridiculous thread, but I guess I’m adding to it. your = possessive: "your eyes” = the eyes you have you’re = you are: “you’re eyes” = you are eyes It’s your eyes. Not you are eyes.
Dude, I am very thankful UA-cam algorithm brought me to this video. Recently, I had problems with corrupted files on my flash drives. I realized I have this habit of not properly ejecting flash drives. Now, the memories of my lost data are haunting me for that stupidity.
gfrewqpoiu yeah, but different Linux distros run differently. There are some that will only have it mount whenever it's actually needed, there are some that will constantly use it, and risk corruption if it's removed.
AndyTom It was a coding class and I lost the game I was working on. Luckily it was just a simple game since back then I didn't know anything complex. The good thing was that we were already working on another game just for fun and decide to use that game for the project instead.
The cdrom eject is a better example than you think. In my years working on personal computers I came across plenty of drives that when you hit "eject" would spit out the tray with the disk still spinning. Scratched the crap out of more than a few discs. Once it spit the tray out just right with the disc still spinning that it flew across the room from the tray. Reminded me of one of the demon friends of PinHead.
Honestly, as long as you didn't JUST hit save or load something off of it your fine to do so. The video wasn't to bad, but also been proven many other places. USB drives idle when not used, they don't keep passing information so just popping it out really doesn't do much. Your teacher, ha ha i'd be "THAT GUY' that would just randomly do it for shits to fuck with them
One interesting problem. I took a usb drive from one computer without ejecting it. I put it into another computer and added files. Then ejected that. So far so good. I now put it back into the first machine. It had the directory structure in memory so it didn't refresh it from the drive. But this structure was missing the new files. NOW when I ejected the drive it wrote THAT structure to the disk effectively making all those new files disappear.
I actually learned about ejecting sticks from my it teacher in early 2000s, but not in as detailed as here. Been ejecting drives on pc & mac ever since. It just grinds my gears when I give the stick to a friend or office worker and they just pull it out. They keep saying it's fine. I did have a corrupted stick that was yanked out by smb else. Couldn't format it on windows or mac; I had to throw it away
As someone who used to make programs, i can confirm write back cache is used heavily. Always close programs properly, and select eject. If sonething hangs, give it time. It's never worth trying to force something to happen and risk losing all data.
Depending the OS and application using the Flash media, it may not actually write the data to the device but simply allocate the space. This ensures the device has space for the data and allows for faster functionality of whatever software is using the device. This was because older architecture did not have the bus speeds to access the drive as fast as software could function. So when you "eject" a device, you are telling the OS to finish writing data to the device.
Destroyed my 128 GB pro DSLR SD card by yanking it out of my pc. I had no clue Microsoft decided to start moving stuff and now it isn’t even recognised by my pc and my camera says it’s unreadable :(
what i like even more than just a corrupted file after unplugging the usb is when for some reason thats only logical to windows that drive is locked into read only mode, and you have to jump a few hoops to get it back to be able to safe or delete files again
@Rushil Kasetty you're missing the point, this was meant to make fun of the fact that Apple has decided to strip as many ports as possible from all of their tech, even iPhone. Usb is getting more and more scarce, which is kind of scary considering the vast majority of people use the standard usb layout, whether it be usb 1 2 or 3. Not many people have usb c removable drives yet, and it's kind of a pain to go out and by a whole dongle just to plug in a usb stick. On paper it looks desireable because the design is slim light and sleek, but in practice, it's more of a hassle than it's really worth, but Apple isn't really listening to the general public. Otherwise they'd add a usb 3.1 port to the MacBook, and a headphone jack to the iPhone.
I remember when my school flash drive got completely corrupted for not ejecting it (or for getting a virus idk). The point is it didn't even let me see the files that contained the flash drive, because it didn't have the main .dll file. So backup your backup and always eject the flash drive.
My sister has been through 7 ish drives in the last 6 months because she never ejects it, it ends up either deleting files or corrupting the whole drive. Make sure you eject if you use them for any sort of work or school
+Kendokaa Or use a tool such as testdisk to rebuild the partition. There is a part of the drive which tells a computer how files are stored on it, and when that part is damaged your computer isn't able to find any of the files, even though they are often still there. Some tools can scan the full drive to rebuild that part and you'll have most of your data back. Such tools can take hours to do that though.
Short answer--it depends. Some applications will "lock" the drive and if you simply pull the USB drive from the port, you may corrupt the files. On the other hand, in most cases, you can pull the drive out as long as the activity/status LED is not flashing or is solid (meaning no read/writing is taking place). I always just use the Eject function in Windows to be safe. This ensures that nothing is being written/read from the drive when you remove it from the system.
Yes, definitely always eject even if write caching is off. You never know what the OS is currently doing. I wish the OS developers across the board would introduce an "Ok to eject?" option though. I've often experienced that the "You can now eject the USB drive" is being suppressed because of something else that just happened at the same time so I never actually got to see it. And sometimes it takes a long time for it to pop up due to much data having been cached which makes you uncertain since there's no progress bar anywhere. So a more obvious way to show whether a drive is ready for un-plugging that could be clicked would be a bit help. In general it's just really badly designed as it is right now, on all platforms.
That's not a bad idea. Some thumdrives already have color LEDs. Why cant they just make it to where it's lit up read, it means "Dont remove" and green means it's OK to eject. Most of the time, I just see the stupid LED blinking.... which is hardly useful other than knowing that the computer is reading or writing to the drive.
Word! I was wondering Linus to tell us what should we do if the system doesn't allow you to eject the device properly because whatever the fuck is still writing or doing but I'm not currently opening files or making use of it under any program, not alternative but just pull it out when that happens.
Do you remember in windows XP and vista, when you removed the CD while running something from it, the persistent error window named NO DISK "Ignore" "Retry" "Cancel" when you had to click few hudred times to make it gone ?
I think it's gotten much better. I remember I had a digital camera in the early 00's and removing it without ejecting destroyed all of my photos. I've never had any issues since, although if it's anywhere near important data, I'll always hit eject before removing.
The problem is, if the eject function is to "tell Windows to wrap up whatever it's doing", it really isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Not only does it not actually wrap anything up, but it tells me that it cannot eject and does not tell me which application it is being accessed by. Furthermore, even when all applications (foreground and background) are shut down, many times it tells me that it is still under use. I end up restarting the computer to eject it, or, if I'm absolutely sure nothing is being written and if I have a copy of the files on the storage device elsewhere, I just yank it out. It really should be implemented better.
This is usually caused by a buggy driver or shell extension that invalidly holds open a reference to a file somewhere on the drive. Sometimes you can get lucky with SysInternals' Process Explorer's handle search, and find whatever's holding it open. You're supposed to close references to files that aren't in use anymore, and if you're a driver or shell extension, you're also supposed to register for notifications from the system so it can let you know when it's trying to eject a filesystem you're currently using. But considering any dumbfuck with the ability to Google and install VSC can write a shell extension, (and the people companies have making their drivers and shell extensions are often just that skilled), you'll find them skipping a lot of things they're "supposed to do" because "it works just fine on my system, stupid Microsoft over-complicating everything." Yeah, Microsoft has those standards that you're supposed to do, but there's no real way to enforce them. "Well, fuck those people, Microsoft should just change to enforcing it, anyway, and break those people that don't know what they're doing." Yeah, funny story, Microsoft did that in the past. It's called Vista. Remember how well THAT turned out? Don't get me wrong, there were TONS of problems with Vista when it first came out, and the blame for it belongs all over the place for different reasons(including Microsoft themselves, yes.) However, the absolute biggest problem for Vista was the staggeringly large amount of software that wasn't prepared for Vista to start enforcing user-admin privilege separation boundaries. Note that I didn't say "add"; those boundaries existed since even before Windows NT 4.0, back in 1996. However, NT was really only used in businesses. Consumer stuff used the DOS-based 9x line, which didn't have those boundaries. Until XP, which merged the 9x and NT lines, brought those same security boundaries to home users. How did application developers react to the new standards? With a big "meh". "It works fine, as long as it's on an admin account, and everyone uses admin accounts with XP, anyway." "Stupid Microsoft, trying to over-complicate everything." And then Vista came out. And we all know how that went. The problem with Microsoft making a change and starting to be heavy-handed in enforcing guidelines like this is that it doesn't punish the companies that made the programs in question; it punishes their _customers._ MICROSOFT'S customers. And when they break those programs, what do the customers logically think? "It worked on Windows X, it's broken on Windows Y. Microsoft broke it, god, they can't do anything right." I know it publicly doesn't seem like it today, but it's really interesting how far MS takes application compatibility, simply because they know that last bit. ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf has some really interesting stories from Raymond Chen, one of the core devs on the Windows team that dates back, I believe, to Windows 1.0 itself. He's been there the entire way, and he has all kinds of fascinating crap about what they see from third parties, and have to deal with. ESPECIALLY the games that hardware makers play, trying to save a bit of resources, either in the hardware itself, or in dev time for the drivers. Besides that, he's got a lot more stuff at Old New Thing, his blog: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42753
I have used thumb drives thousands of times. Transfering hundreds of terabytes of data at least. Not once have I ever ejected it, and not once have I ever had corrupted data :p
Ejuice Vaper Read my response again and see if there’s anything wrong to what I said. I’ll assure you there isn’t. On the other hand, leaving pitbulls with children unattended is a cruel thing and you think that’s good? At this point i’m not even gonna respond back to you, have a “good” day.
Loneamaruq He * and no, not lying. I've been using USBs for 10 years now. I've used them for raring 75gb games into parts to transfer one piece at a time for offline PCs in the past. Hundreds and hundreds of GB's of movies and TV shows every few months, etc. By this time in my life, yes definitely hundreds or tb of data transfer using USBs.
0:40 Sure you did or have you ever seen a high spinning ejected CD? No matter whether via the software or the button, the CD was actually prepared for the release. By the way, I've already lost a USB stick because I didn't eject it - it's now permanently write-protected and any action to change it failed.
Back in the days, I was actually pretty careful about ejecting CD drives. I actually had a couple of times where Windows (98 SE, I think) bluescreened on me because I ejected a CD that was still in use.
Then just restart your computer. Or better yet, Shut Down the computer, and when you know that the computer has completely shut down, pull the drive out, and turn your computer back on.
I get that one every now and then, quite annoying. When this happens, I just make sure that everything I had open on the drive was closed, wait a second or two, then yank it out anyway - I'm not going to reboot my PC just to eject a thumb-drive that Explorer won't disconnect for some unexplained reason.
101ToonLink why should someone have to shut down their machine just to eject their USB drive? Especially if someone has a slower machine that takes a while to boot up
You can disable write caching on linux with the command `hdparm -0 /dev/sdX` it's not harder than windows. -1 to enable it, it work with partitions too. You can also sync the data without ejecting, simply with the `sync` command. A must when using `dd` to create bootable USB drives
So my external hard drive doesn't have an eject option. Should I just yank out? What I've been doing is leaving it running until I turn the computer off, then unplug it before I turn it back on.
For fast devices, you have good odds that you can do this "yank the USB" trick if nothing else is going on at the time. BUT if your machine is being used as a server (i.e. hosting something or someone besides you), it becomes more on the "probably safe" side than the "certainly safe" side. Now, when will your machine be used as a server? Some games that allow you to play multi-player mode in your household's Local Area Network will allow you to designate a server for your game. That means that the computer acting as a server will be VERY busy and therefore will diddle the odds of safe removal of the USB. The EJECT option, as noted, issues an I/O FLUSH command to that device - and that means that all writes in the write-back queue get written before you get the notification. On larger O/S setups, this is called a "DISMOUNT" operation.
More than 15 years of computer usage and never ejected my USB stick ... never had corrupted files or whatever. It would make more sense for HDDs/SSDs, which have on demand files running on it, like for example a logger, server files, server engines (apache, XAMPP and Co.) and thus unplugging the drive without ejecting might cause issues, since, if you even don't write anything on them, the main frame (OS on a drive directly plugged via SATA for example) will recall for data, ping those USB/TB/whatever plugged-in drives and might lose the string after those drives getting unplugged without a completed procedure. Ejecting USB sticks ... makes no sense to me. They are not designed for running a system or store important or credential on-demand files on it, necessary for a OS or any other application on the desk. If that is necessary, you simply avoid putting data to your USB stick anyways and leave them next to your application's range.
If I do that in Windows 7/8/10, next time when I plug the drive in, windows will ask for File System Check. Happend to me with different PCs and drives, even if the check result will be "no problems found"
You are lucky. I have had a job where we worked heavily with data on USB drives. I have corrupted many by not removing them. Just because you are lucky does not prevent the good idea of properly ejecting.
Not ejecting your USB drives is like randomly making someone go into labor like "you're taking to long to have that baby, yank" and now you have a metaphorical corrupted fetus.
1:09 OS: Writing this file to the USB drive D:... You: [Pulls out the USB stick] OS: Hey! Where's the USB gone?! I still have half a [censored]-ing file to write!
For those of you wondering, corrupted data by yanking your USB is very rare on a desktop. Manufacturers have done a pretty good job catching those issues and making flash drives mindless to use. However, you WILL see these types of corruption issue more often when saving information from an Android smartphone onto a flash drive. As Linus mentioned, Linux has write caching enabled by default so it is also enabled on Android as well. Some Android versions also don't have the ability to eject the drive. I had this happen to me when I was moving a .txt file from one tablet to another with my trusty keychain flash drive that convert between Mini-usb, USB 2, USB Type C. The file ended up corrupted during the process for basically no reason. I didn't know why it did that until I watched this video. lol For the record, I first made sure that I could open the file on the phone after it was loaded onto the flash drive. It opened just fine. I unplug the drive, plug it into the other phone and sure enough it was corrupt. I did the same exact process a second time, and it worked. So yes, Write Caching is a bitch.
Then just restart your computer. Or better yet, Shut Down the computer, and when you know that the computer has completely shut down, pull the drive out, and turn your computer back on.
Protecting whatever data it is working on at that time is exactly what ejecting a USB is supposed to protect. Wait until it's done with whatever it's doing then trying ejecting it again... or risk losing the data.
If It's on windows, go to the task manager and restart explorer. On MacOS, restart Finder from the Command+Option+Escape Menu, I don't know the Linux equivalent.
Quite a few people are too rough when they remove the drive from the port anyway. Lesson: fully eject, make sure your'e not transferring or saving data, and be gentle with your drives.
Chuck Norrris doesn't need a flash drive to save data. It just simply stored into him. The same can be said when uploading data. It simply comes into the computer whenever he please.
You can use the same storage on the phone and on the PC same time. Old android phones ejected the storage when you plugged it into PC (you couldn't access your pics etc on your phone at the same time) and you needed to eject it on the PC before disconnecting it.
Have a galaxy s6 on my desk rn, and you can absolutely eject it from your computer. It's seen as a removable media device by my windows 8 laptop, and my windows 10 computer. Do the same thing as usual for a usb drive, go to "safely remove media" and Select "Galaxy s6 Media Device". Same thing works for any iPhone I've ever had as well. It also depends on how you connect your phone, if it's seen as just charging, it wont even show up in the media devices
Some programs will keep your USB flashdrive "in use" even after you close a file. Acrobat does that so it can open other files faster. It keeps scanning the drive until after after you close the program.
Yeah. Happened to me. We use USB's very frequently for Product Key Injection and DMI tools, boot media etc. Closed all the programs I was using, pulled it out. When I went to use it, it wouldn't work. So, either it wasn't ACTUALLY finished using it, or the drive decided to die at that precise moment. Either way, I've ejected since then, and haven't had an issue. It takes 5 seconds at most,m but saves me a lot of frustration.
Josh eh. I'm 21 and I am gentle as an angel with my devices. I've used all sorts of Sandisk USB sticks and SD cards and a couple of Samsung SD cards and if I removed without ejecting on a regular basis it would eventually or quickly lose data. I've only done it on Windows XP-10 computers and I've never had issues with ejecting. odd that you have. maybe it's because you've previously removed without ejecting and in doing so corrupted data by ejecting?? idk I'm not *that* smart. ah well :P
![[RANT] The DUMBEST Thing About USB](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/gShRBsahzXg/mqdefault.jpg)
Once I was saving an almost-finished school paper to my USB and my bro yanked it out cause he needed it for something.
-I now have one less brother.-
I use Google Drive now.
Lol
r/corpsesbeingbros
Never use an external drive as your only backup of an important document.
Thank god you still had the document on your computer, huh? Would've sucked to have to rewrite the entire paper.
Wouldn't the paper still be on the system's RAM? And then you could just save it to another drive?
So basically he's saying "Eject before you pull out". Got it.
PHRASING!!!
Wait...
Wot?!
doesent that make the pullout method obsolete?
Snicker, snicker,
Me: Closes all Programms adn windows and Clicks on Eject
Windows: Can't Eject, because a Programm is using this Drive.
Same problem, honestly i just say screw it and turn my computer off then unplug it. I only use my external hard drive for extra video games so unless i'm playing them i don't need it to be plugged in
@@aceinyoface96 I use my main drive for games and a Seagate backup drive for HD movies. After I buy a movie on Blu-Ray or through Vudu, I like to have have a torrented copy that I can play on my Android or Blu-Ray player through the USB drive. I copy a movie or two to my micro SD card at a time to watch on the bus or something so I don't have to worry about buying a separate device. Vudu works just fine with Android, but for Blu-ray discs that don't have that option, it's my preferred method.
i usually just force eject it on file explorer when that happens
This is a common problem. The files have all been closed but windows doesn't know it. So it is being conservative. The problem comes from the delayed write capability where something is stored in memory and later written to the USB. Windows can ASK the USB to store the file. Unless it gets acknowledgment how can it know if its request has been honoured?
Maybe a virus
Remember kids, when a yes or no answer is being asked always replay with "probably" to avoid that 1% chance of shit happens.
I do that always
has worked since
here in america, we just pull out.
ok, probably my guess who character has white hair
Yes
Yes and No
A highschool teacher of mine freaked out on me because I didn't eject my USB and a warning message popped up. She thought I'd just destroyed the classroom's iMac.
Lol
when you press "shift" button continueosly you get a popup telling you can activate disabled people mode. it happened in school and they thought i "LET" a virus come in (there was no internet).
yeah, well, when students know more about computers than their teachers, these things can happen...
students doesnt know more. Teachers are the ones who has no clue what is going on. Theyre just there for the salary lol.
R3dp055um
It's not their lack of knowledge that bothers me, but their inability to accept the fact that the student might be correct and to learn and move forward.
But many USB drives will keep their light on solid after you say "Eject" and the computer has said "It is now safe to eject your drive!"
@@mysticlyweird6474 But then wouldn't it always be SOLID, it wouldn't flash at all if the light was wired to power???
@@mikefellhauer3350 no
That light might be a power light ejecting makes sure no programs are currently writing or reading from that flash drive so you can pull it out without interrupting anything
I thought this comment was meant as a joke. Looks like it's not, in that case, what do you do with those _no light_ usbs? Obviously eject from the system first and when the system says it's ok, physically pull it out
Big brain but my USB doesn't have a light
Dang Linus. I was hoping you would say premature ejecting is totally ok and we can now yank our parts at will and take back our lives.
Gavin Seim can I eject safely from this video? or is it to premature and I might become corrupt by this video? 😁
Premature ejecting could be embarassing. Anyway if you yank your parts before the act you may actually last longer. You welcome.
Stargazer 😆😆😆👍 I myself always leave it in and eject a few hours later! 😁
Heh
Gavin Seim premature ejectulating😂😂😂😂😂
Whenever i take my USB out or put it in my Computer, i changed the system noise to Mario Screaming.
I don't regret it.
That's amazing. May i also recommend that the Wilhelm scream as another great alternative?
I might steal that idea.
What setting, I always wanted to do this.
I love that idea and will do the same shortly
TELL ME HOW TO DO THAT
For Linux users: the 'sync' command can resolve write chaching directly
Or even a simple dismount command 😜
caching*
Last time I looked the modern equivalent of the update daemon to flush dirty buffer cache pages still operates every 10s, so the traditional sh -c "sync; sync" wouldn't really help.
What if your USB is erasing pages, wear levelling or re-writing them? Don't you think telling it to go offline anticipating power loss is safer?
@@RobBCactive it's safer but to just resolve write caching e.g. on a network drive or a USB 'sync' will do the job. Though to just take it 'offline' etc. is still better for USB.
Can't help it, I'm a premature ejectulator.
Read as ejaculator xD
fuq my life ;-;
aw come-on folks, we don't need the joke explained... just like and move on.
Not premature, ain't got no Time to wait
lol
Victor Vallim That's the point of the joke...
Summary:
Yes you do, if you don't data might get corrupt
Fawazlol That’s too quick for a tech quickie
it might
So it becomes a politician?
congratulations on misinformation
Glass mind correcting?
1:18 It funny until I heard the word "True story happened to a friend of mine"...
I just wonder, why this friend hasn't had ANY copy of his thesis on any other device? I saved my master thesis during writing on two external hard drives, one USB drive and the internal drive, as well as I had it uploaded into Google Drive ;)
This guy builds expensive computers.. I wonder if he let his friend go homeless or helped him out?
I would have saved mine on my USB flash drive, my USB SATA SSD, my C: drive, and OneDrive.
@@acmenipponair i think that happened years ago in Linus's life. Back then backing up files like that wasn't a norm.
Think of not ejecting your USB drive as not closing a book when you put it on the bookshelf.
You can do it a few time and the book is still readable, but if you shove an open book into a bookshelf enough times, you'll start tearing pages up, making it unreadable.
Interesting metaphor, but makes sense!
Really good analogy.
I've always ejectulated first but good shit.
👍👍
Well then I'll just get some tape and stick the torn pages back together. That will make it readable again.
Spot on analogy. Did you steal this from someone else?
I hate it when my PC tells me *your drive can not be ejected at the moment*
Exactly, it's like "bitch I already waited for you? You getting the fuck out bro!" *yank*
The real cause of that message is usually not the PC, it's the WinOS running on it.
how to force windows to eject the usb drive or usb hdd when the os say some @sshole program still working on it without shutdown the computer?
close every windows. that might do the trick
I hate this about Windows. Ejecting on Linux is more forceful than Windows, and I rarely have it tell me that it is unable to eject.
"True story, happened to a friend of mine"
Can confirm, I was that friend.
You too....Lets get him.
Tim Horton's?
I for one am extremely disappointed that the 'elect' button doesn't spit the USB out half way across the room.
fcukugimmeausername like a toaster?
Solder Heart yes, but stronger and horizontal.
same. but that mechanism would take up alot of space. would be cool in a desktop maybe
Substitute elect for eject
2 months and I didn't even realise. Lol.
If it's so easy to corrupt data, why dont' computers have an actual "eject" button to press first?
it has...its called "shutdown" button. There's a difference between hard drives and flash drives. Hard drive is basically a disk, which cant be corrupt easily and flash drives data are stored in a chip which can be at risk on corrupting your data.
Larry Bundy Jr y
The real answer is it's not. As long as you've completed your write cycle, just pull the bitch out.
Anyone who thinks you need to eject a usb drive before you remove it doesn't have a clue how they work.
Steven Mactavish I'm positive that's not why it happened. Think about how many devices don't even have an eject option.
Data has been getting corrupted long before SD cards and USB ports. Sometimes factory defects, sometimes user error, sometimes even poor data management by the OS. Reguardless, if you are not currently writing data to the device there is nothing unplugging it can possibly do to it.
also you never know if some program isn't accessing your USB drive for some reason WHILE you pull it out ...
things like that can happen. (especially with newer software that likes to scan drives to import new photos, and so on)
I've been lucky that I've never had files destroyed or lost by not ejecting first, but now I know, I'm definitely taking the time to eject. Thank you for educating me!
Well you SHOULD ALWAYS EJECT your USB Flash Drive first before removing it
I learned the hard way in middle school about just pulling out a USB drive and had it corrupted. When I was in high school, before we got Google Docs that multiple people could edit on, we would get together in groups with multiple people with several laptops and one USB that we would have on Word doc on, edit it with our part, and pass it on to the next person. In my group we had to use my personal USB drive and I was mortified. I made my classmates eject my drive every time before pulling it out and they would get all huffy and annoyed and say it didn't matter. The only way I got them to listen was to tell them that I was using my personal drive and that whomever messed it up would have to buy me a new one and that we would lose our project and have to start again.
Valuable Life Advice:
Don't drink and drive.
Don't throw rocks at bears.
Eject your freaking USB drive.
Here's another one for the list:
Don't throw shit at an armed man. (Niven's 1st law)
[Corrollary: Don't stand next to someone who's throwing shit at an armed man.]
Don't stand next to an armed man who's getting shit thrown at him (you don't want any of it to splash on you after all)
I throw bears at rocks
True story, shortly after I started working at an MSP my boss cackled when I asked if he was going to use the eject function before disconnecting a USB hard drive. That hard drive literally lost its partition table.
i always try to eject and Windows then usually says no. so i go to task manager and restart Explorer, which sometimes frees the drive from Windows' clutches. if it still refuses to let it go i just disconnect the drive anyway because goddammit Windows, at least fucking tell me what you're doing with the drive that's so important
^^^ This for sure.
Valfaun If you eject the USB in Explorer then it works better than using the system tray icon. I find that I have to click eject twice if I use the system tray, but it works instantly in Explorer.
Exactly this. I have a portable hard drive, and even software like USB safely remove I can't get windows to let me safely eject it.
totally this
I just keep an eye on the activity light on the external drive. If it stops blinking, I pull it out even of Windows says otherwise.
People might say that "life is too short to eject USB drives" but my *porn* collection is too valuable to take that chance.
So your porn collection is only 4-32 GB? Wow thats really small.
@@Fankas2000 where did you get 4-32??
@@caseybear910fe Thats the size of most USB drives.
Fankas2000 64 & 128 are very cheap nowadays
@@MichaelWarne Which part of "most" did you not get? Plus if you are going in to th 128 GB territory then you might as well just buy an external hard drive.
my dad is the most tech savvy person in my family so, of course, when he finished modding my 2ds sd card and i finished editing my acnl save, he ejected and waited for the "safe to remove" prompt before removing the sd card and inserting it back into my 2ds (my 2ds is pretty much my life now so of course we didn't want to run the risk of data corruption even though my dad did create a folder on his desktop and copy-pasted everything on the sd card into it)
My sister has a modded 2ds too and i got a modded new 2ds xl
I got a modded 3dsxl
Someone calculate please what amount of time an average person spends ejecting usb drives in their lifetime
2 hours per 10 years, assuming 2 seconds and ejecting it once a day
I lost a file 15 years ago and had to get up and walk 10 steps back to the other computer to copy it onto the drive again, that is 5 minutes of my life I will never get back, you cannot put a price on that, I always make sure to eject my USB flash drives.
Bubbauk88 lmfao
So let's assume that the general user ejects a USB drive from their PC at least 2 or 3 times per day, so that's 6 seconds per day (this will then factor in days where the USB drive is not used I would think).
Now there's 7 days per week so that makes it 42 seconds of ejecting per week, and 52 weeks in a year bringing us to a total of 2184 seconds per year (or 36 minutes and 24 seconds).
Let's assume that the average user starts using USB drives at around age 5 and the typical life expectancy is around 75-80 (could be higher but I'm making assumptions).
So that's about 70-75 years of using USB drives, at 2184 seconds per year of ejecting, the average time spent in a lifetime ejecting USB drives amounts to about 152880 - 163800 seconds.
That's roughly between 1day 18hours 28minutes and 1day 21hours 30minutes.
So, when you think about it, you waste almost 2 days of your entire life ejecting USB drives 😂😂
Bubbauk88 same happened to me. Never again. Say no to premature ejecting.
You guys are so helpful. I'm currently studying for my A+ exam and every time I have some stupid question ab a specific topic, you have a video about it. Thankyou all so much for such great content
Typing a research paper for my Physician Assistant program my computer died and upon turning back on the blue screen of death came up. After rebooting my entire 11 page masterpiece was gone! Crying I called my professor at 12 am and she basically said, “sucks to suck, can’t prove you’re not lying”. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS SAVE THINGS PROPERLY AFTER EACH PARAGRAPH!!!
Always eject sd cards first. I've corrupted way to many cards in photography, luckily it was just my personal ones.
you misspelt pornography
@@squidblaster3327 how do I delete someone else comment
@@natend741 you report it and hope that whatever black hole that leads to ends up doing something.
I have never ejected a drive and even plugged out an ssd with my OS on it so yeah I won’t do that
@@squidblaster3327 oh hush
I completely forgot that was even a thing you could do.
Always use safe eject for external hard drives because they should stop spinning before power cuts off. If you think just pulling USB flash drive out is safe, you can do it, but I always use safe eject for any external storage. In macOS, safe ejection is easier than in Windows.
I tried to click the subscribe button twice but it says "unsubscribe".
ok
Use an alt account
i think its cuz you broke your computer by not ejecting the usb drive properly
That's how dumb the topic of this video is, right?
If the unsubscribe appeared it means you are already subscribed.
Always do it. I always ejected my drives, until one day, my computer was being stupid, and I pulled it out without ejecting it. That was the only time I had done that, and that one time I _did_ do it, it corrupted my entire flash drive with like 7 years worth of stuff, and made it completely unusable.
I was told to use some programme to recover scraps of files, but that just returned corrupted versions of the files, and even after formatting the drive, it was still completely unusable.
I did it ONCE. And that one time I did it, it corrupted everything. So never think, "oh, it'll be fine just this once.".
@Frank Winkhorst, yeah, luckily, I had done a backup about a month earlier, but I still lost everything I had done in that month. I now do it once a week, or after I do anything really important.
Why do you store your files on flash drives, tho? I mean, it is even safer on hard drives or cloud storage
This sounds like a PSA for why drugs are bad ☠️
The worst time to do it is when your computer "is being stupid."
If your computer is saying "You can't eject this. It's still in use.", you *really* can't just take it out.
1:49 I'm not epileptic, but a warning for the flashing lights would be very kind to those who are
Lol no
69 the Liker here
Get over it and if you watch videos while having this you deserve it. Just god telling you to keep your eyes shut.
Let someone with this defect comment before you go on a holy crusade. While I am all up for accessibility, there is definitely a upper limit we are reaching with these sort of arguments. We can't realistically accomodate for every physical handicap or political opinion in our daily lives neither should we have to. It is upto epileptic person to lower their brightness or some other solution.
I always eject it because I don't want to risk losing my porn
_Preciooouuuusss_
You’re confusing this with pulling out too late!
Ew
Are you Randy Pitchford?
@nersoparanaense I know that joke XD
when you watch linus' video with linus' ads...
perfection
"Try closing you're eyes, and picture a cd tray sliding out, for a little bit of computing nostalgia"
me with a modern pc with a cd drive...
youse dat cd dryve to learnt spalling
your*
@@haseenabadshah5381 you dumbass its you're get good at english dum dum
@@rixy560 This is a ridiculous thread, but I guess I’m adding to it.
your = possessive: "your eyes” = the eyes you have
you’re = you are: “you’re eyes” = you are eyes
It’s your eyes. Not you are eyes.
@@yehoshuas.6917 ahhaah okay sorry im so bad at english xd
1:05 is the reason I now always eject my flash drives.
0:43 "physically ejected CD ROMs" ROM is the key point, meaning Read Only Memory, yeah? With Flash Drives you can read *and* write.
They're not ROMs, but CD-RWs could be written to, as well. What a terrible and pointless technology they were.
@@encycl07pedia- Linus specifically said "CD-ROM"
video title: do you really need to eject usb drives?
let me save you 5 and a half minutes: yes you SHOULD do it.
there you go.
"prehistoric 1990s".......
Ouch.
in tech years....prehistoric
hey its not my fault i'm stuck on this old 90s potato
nfs iii ftw
Philippe cf
It hurt 😞
*accidentally bumps thumb drive*
Haha, I'm in danger.
Dude, I am very thankful UA-cam algorithm brought me to this video. Recently, I had problems with corrupted files on my flash drives. I realized I have this habit of not properly ejecting flash drives. Now, the memories of my lost data are haunting me for that stupidity.
I pulled my 8gb USB out of my chromebook without an eject, instantly removed all of the data on there... Don't do it on Chrome OS
Chrome OS is based on Linux
gfrewqpoiu yeah, but different Linux distros run differently. There are some that will only have it mount whenever it's actually needed, there are some that will constantly use it, and risk corruption if it's removed.
Not really. The IO scheduler is the same between distros because they all use the same kernel.
Subsentient I've used multiple distros, I'm well aware they use the same kernel but they do different things sometimes.
I guess some DEs might do things differently, but I haven't seen it on GNOME, MATE, KDE, XFCE or Enlightenment.
I've had a project that's corrupted because I took my USB drive pulled out, mid-saving... started over, got traumatized, learned my lesson...
DANDAN THE DANDAN
This is why you copy files rather than just moving them
AndyTom At that time, I didn't know what was the best choice... I had the file in my USB and not in the computer...
DANDAN THE DANDAN
Ah gotya. Man I just hate losing important data. That must've been a real bitch
AndyTom It was a coding class and I lost the game I was working on. Luckily it was just a simple game since back then I didn't know anything complex. The good thing was that we were already working on another game just for fun and decide to use that game for the project instead.
This was why I used Google Docs when I was in College.
The cdrom eject is a better example than you think. In my years working on personal computers I came across plenty of drives that when you hit "eject" would spit out the tray with the disk still spinning. Scratched the crap out of more than a few discs. Once it spit the tray out just right with the disc still spinning that it flew across the room from the tray. Reminded me of one of the demon friends of PinHead.
Never ejected any USB drive and never had problems so far, I'll keep being lazy and crossing my finger, not like I put important data on them anyway
Kurgo yup same XD
Honestly, as long as you didn't JUST hit save or load something off of it your fine to do so.
The video wasn't to bad, but also been proven many other places. USB drives idle when not used, they don't keep passing information so just popping it out really doesn't do much.
Your teacher, ha ha i'd be "THAT GUY' that would just randomly do it for shits to fuck with them
Isn’t hentai important?
DonutEater is right, eject your usb drives m8
once broke a usb stick, wasnt able to remount an image on the raw space :D
Why does he look like Linus tech tips
he sounds like him too...
doppelganger?
A lot of UA-camrs are about his age? But I agree.
Because he is....
Probably his dad
Cuz hes LTT Linus tech tips doppelganger.
One interesting problem. I took a usb drive from one computer without ejecting it. I put it into another computer and added files. Then ejected that. So far so good. I now put it back into the first machine. It had the directory structure in memory so it didn't refresh it from the drive. But this structure was missing the new files. NOW when I ejected the drive it wrote THAT structure to the disk effectively making all those new files disappear.
Computer : "you pulled out right?"
Usb drive : "yeah"
Yep, I lost 50gb of porn by doing this... won't ever do that again
chris p That'll teach anyone not to just yank it! 🍆
Never pull out.
XD
Good.
i bet that p0rn was good
I actually learned about ejecting sticks from my it teacher in early 2000s, but not in as detailed as here. Been ejecting drives on pc & mac ever since. It just grinds my gears when I give the stick to a friend or office worker and they just pull it out. They keep saying it's fine. I did have a corrupted stick that was yanked out by smb else. Couldn't format it on windows or mac; I had to throw it away
As someone who used to make programs, i can confirm write back cache is used heavily.
Always close programs properly, and select eject.
If sonething hangs, give it time. It's never worth trying to force something to happen and risk losing all data.
4:11
Why imagine when I already have a dvd drive built into one of my laptops?
Depending the OS and application using the Flash media, it may not actually write the data to the device but simply allocate the space. This ensures the device has space for the data and allows for faster functionality of whatever software is using the device. This was because older architecture did not have the bus speeds to access the drive as fast as software could function. So when you "eject" a device, you are telling the OS to finish writing data to the device.
I've bricked a USB flash drive and an SD card by not ejecting.
Me either
Same here!
i guess you guys learned your lessons ? lol
@Adkatka really? No crap. Not like he said that or anything
Destroyed my 128 GB pro DSLR SD card by yanking it out of my pc. I had no clue Microsoft decided to start moving stuff and now it isn’t even recognised by my pc and my camera says it’s unreadable :(
Always flush your buffers kids
what i like even more than just a corrupted file after unplugging the usb is when for some reason thats only logical to windows that drive is locked into read only mode, and you have to jump a few hoops to get it back to be able to safe or delete files again
0:34
I’m sorry, but did you just try to plug a USB into a Mac!
Uh, what do you mean? Most Macs have USB ports. The only one that doesn't is the new MacBook.
I'm more disturbed by the location. Were they plugging it into the battery? The USB port is in the top right on that model.
@Rushil Kasetty you're missing the point, this was meant to make fun of the fact that Apple has decided to strip as many ports as possible from all of their tech, even iPhone. Usb is getting more and more scarce, which is kind of scary considering the vast majority of people use the standard usb layout, whether it be usb 1 2 or 3. Not many people have usb c removable drives yet, and it's kind of a pain to go out and by a whole dongle just to plug in a usb stick. On paper it looks desireable because the design is slim light and sleek, but in practice, it's more of a hassle than it's really worth, but Apple isn't really listening to the general public. Otherwise they'd add a usb 3.1 port to the MacBook, and a headphone jack to the iPhone.
Kenneth Fleming yes I agree, but his comment didn't seem to be a joke to me. I guess sorry if it was though.
Apple products are awful. Check out Louis Rossmann group if you don;t know why
Living on the edge is hard. Corrupted data is the cost we pay for living on the fast lane!
That's probably what happened to all of those loser democrats and liberals. They all pulled out without ejecting. Now they are all stupid.
You never see anybody eject an USB in a Hollywood movie, just before they copy the files from the CIA server & save the world.
I remember when my school flash drive got completely corrupted for not ejecting it (or for getting a virus idk). The point is it didn't even let me see the files that contained the flash drive, because it didn't have the main .dll file.
So backup your backup and always eject the flash drive.
My sister has been through 7 ish drives in the last 6 months because she never ejects it, it ends up either deleting files or corrupting the whole drive. Make sure you eject if you use them for any sort of work or school
she must be doing somethign else wrong i not even knew this was a thing and been not doing it my whole life never had a drive fail or corrupt
...she could just reformat the drive afterwards
Fuck some people are dumb
She's not the most tech savvy person if you haven't already guessed, i dont even think she knows what formatting is
U rlly a mek him diss ur sister suh?
+Kendokaa Or use a tool such as testdisk to rebuild the partition. There is a part of the drive which tells a computer how files are stored on it, and when that part is damaged your computer isn't able to find any of the files, even though they are often still there. Some tools can scan the full drive to rebuild that part and you'll have most of your data back. Such tools can take hours to do that though.
"Living in a box behind Tim Hortons"
Yes, Linus is Canadian alright
Short answer--it depends. Some applications will "lock" the drive and if you simply pull the USB drive from the port, you may corrupt the files. On the other hand, in most cases, you can pull the drive out as long as the activity/status LED is not flashing or is solid (meaning no read/writing is taking place). I always just use the Eject function in Windows to be safe. This ensures that nothing is being written/read from the drive when you remove it from the system.
Yes, definitely always eject even if write caching is off. You never know what the OS is currently doing. I wish the OS developers across the board would introduce an "Ok to eject?" option though. I've often experienced that the "You can now eject the USB drive" is being suppressed because of something else that just happened at the same time so I never actually got to see it. And sometimes it takes a long time for it to pop up due to much data having been cached which makes you uncertain since there's no progress bar anywhere. So a more obvious way to show whether a drive is ready for un-plugging that could be clicked would be a bit help. In general it's just really badly designed as it is right now, on all platforms.
That's not a bad idea. Some thumdrives already have color LEDs. Why cant they just make it to where it's lit up read, it means "Dont remove" and green means it's OK to eject. Most of the time, I just see the stupid LED blinking.... which is hardly useful other than knowing that the computer is reading or writing to the drive.
Word! I was wondering Linus to tell us what should we do if the system doesn't allow you to eject the device properly because whatever the fuck is still writing or doing but I'm not currently opening files or making use of it under any program, not alternative but just pull it out when that happens.
Or you have a shit PC. I've never encountered a problem where the eject message never popped up
Well, physically ejecting CD is the same as ejecting USB drive. The tray doesn't open on you still spinning LOL
Do you remember in windows XP and vista, when you removed the CD while running something from it, the persistent error window named NO DISK "Ignore" "Retry" "Cancel" when you had to click few hudred times to make it gone ?
@@MobileRecordingsRo Oh yeah! Retro all the way. The coolest in WinXP was the puppy giving you instructions.
@N 4 fking sure!
I think it's gotten much better. I remember I had a digital camera in the early 00's and removing it without ejecting destroyed all of my photos. I've never had any issues since, although if it's anywhere near important data, I'll always hit eject before removing.
The problem is, if the eject function is to "tell Windows to wrap up whatever it's doing", it really isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Not only does it not actually wrap anything up, but it tells me that it cannot eject and does not tell me which application it is being accessed by. Furthermore, even when all applications (foreground and background) are shut down, many times it tells me that it is still under use. I end up restarting the computer to eject it, or, if I'm absolutely sure nothing is being written and if I have a copy of the files on the storage device elsewhere, I just yank it out. It really should be implemented better.
Isaac K how do you close all programs
This is usually caused by a buggy driver or shell extension that invalidly holds open a reference to a file somewhere on the drive. Sometimes you can get lucky with SysInternals' Process Explorer's handle search, and find whatever's holding it open.
You're supposed to close references to files that aren't in use anymore, and if you're a driver or shell extension, you're also supposed to register for notifications from the system so it can let you know when it's trying to eject a filesystem you're currently using. But considering any dumbfuck with the ability to Google and install VSC can write a shell extension, (and the people companies have making their drivers and shell extensions are often just that skilled), you'll find them skipping a lot of things they're "supposed to do" because "it works just fine on my system, stupid Microsoft over-complicating everything." Yeah, Microsoft has those standards that you're supposed to do, but there's no real way to enforce them.
"Well, fuck those people, Microsoft should just change to enforcing it, anyway, and break those people that don't know what they're doing."
Yeah, funny story, Microsoft did that in the past. It's called Vista. Remember how well THAT turned out?
Don't get me wrong, there were TONS of problems with Vista when it first came out, and the blame for it belongs all over the place for different reasons(including Microsoft themselves, yes.)
However, the absolute biggest problem for Vista was the staggeringly large amount of software that wasn't prepared for Vista to start enforcing user-admin privilege separation boundaries. Note that I didn't say "add"; those boundaries existed since even before Windows NT 4.0, back in 1996. However, NT was really only used in businesses. Consumer stuff used the DOS-based 9x line, which didn't have those boundaries.
Until XP, which merged the 9x and NT lines, brought those same security boundaries to home users.
How did application developers react to the new standards? With a big "meh". "It works fine, as long as it's on an admin account, and everyone uses admin accounts with XP, anyway." "Stupid Microsoft, trying to over-complicate everything."
And then Vista came out. And we all know how that went.
The problem with Microsoft making a change and starting to be heavy-handed in enforcing guidelines like this is that it doesn't punish the companies that made the programs in question; it punishes their _customers._ MICROSOFT'S customers.
And when they break those programs, what do the customers logically think?
"It worked on Windows X, it's broken on Windows Y. Microsoft broke it, god, they can't do anything right."
I know it publicly doesn't seem like it today, but it's really interesting how far MS takes application compatibility, simply because they know that last bit.
ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf has some really interesting stories from Raymond Chen, one of the core devs on the Windows team that dates back, I believe, to Windows 1.0 itself. He's been there the entire way, and he has all kinds of fascinating crap about what they see from third parties, and have to deal with. ESPECIALLY the games that hardware makers play, trying to save a bit of resources, either in the hardware itself, or in dev time for the drivers.
Besides that, he's got a lot more stuff at Old New Thing, his blog: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42753
You can go to windows explorer to eject by right click at thumbdrive and select eject. There will be an "eject anyways" options
But make sure you saved everything that you make changes b4 doing it
I have used thumb drives thousands of times. Transfering hundreds of terabytes of data at least. Not once have I ever ejected it, and not once have I ever had corrupted data :p
Ejuice Vaper Shh you'll make the Pitbull owners agro
Of course nothing’s gonna happen if all you do is transfer data to the drives. That isn’t the overrall point of this video.
Ejuice Vaper Read my response again and see if there’s anything wrong to what I said. I’ll assure you there isn’t. On the other hand, leaving pitbulls with children unattended is a cruel thing and you think that’s good? At this point i’m not even gonna respond back to you, have a “good” day.
Loneamaruq He * and no, not lying. I've been using USBs for 10 years now. I've used them for raring 75gb games into parts to transfer one piece at a time for offline PCs in the past. Hundreds and hundreds of GB's of movies and TV shows every few months, etc. By this time in my life, yes definitely hundreds or tb of data transfer using USBs.
Not on a Mac, are we? ROTFLMAO...
0:40 Sure you did or have you ever seen a high spinning ejected CD? No matter whether via the software or the button, the CD was actually prepared for the release.
By the way, I've already lost a USB stick because I didn't eject it - it's now permanently write-protected and any action to change it failed.
Removes USB mouse while using it. Plugs it back on - data corrupted
Hahaha
"surprised pikachu meme"
You joke but that actually happened to my OG Razer Death Adder and, according to the internet at the time, I wasn't the only person it happened to.
U got weird friends linus
Big Smoke he's one of them
Back in the days, I was actually pretty careful about ejecting CD drives. I actually had a couple of times where Windows (98 SE, I think) bluescreened on me because I ejected a CD that was still in use.
I always eject them without disabling it from settings. Never got a data loss or damaged anything on a usb port.
Linus you should also talk about what to do when you close all programs and still shows "this device is currently in use".
beat me to it, commented that as well
Or you Eject USB Drives and still get the same msg "this device is currently in use".
Then just restart your computer. Or better yet, Shut Down the computer, and when you know that the computer has completely shut down, pull the drive out, and turn your computer back on.
I get that one every now and then, quite annoying. When this happens, I just make sure that everything I had open on the drive was closed, wait a second or two, then yank it out anyway - I'm not going to reboot my PC just to eject a thumb-drive that Explorer won't disconnect for some unexplained reason.
101ToonLink why should someone have to shut down their machine just to eject their USB drive? Especially if someone has a slower machine that takes a while to boot up
You can disable write caching on linux with the command `hdparm -0 /dev/sdX` it's not harder than windows. -1 to enable it, it work with partitions too. You can also sync the data without ejecting, simply with the `sync` command. A must when using `dd` to create bootable USB drives
So my external hard drive doesn't have an eject option. Should I just yank out? What I've been doing is leaving it running until I turn the computer off, then unplug it before I turn it back on.
if you plug it out during the write process, then the files get broken and some operating systems can not handle that without breaking
"Das Leben ist zu kurz um Hardware sicher zu entfernen."
For fast devices, you have good odds that you can do this "yank the USB" trick if nothing else is going on at the time. BUT if your machine is being used as a server (i.e. hosting something or someone besides you), it becomes more on the "probably safe" side than the "certainly safe" side. Now, when will your machine be used as a server? Some games that allow you to play multi-player mode in your household's Local Area Network will allow you to designate a server for your game. That means that the computer acting as a server will be VERY busy and therefore will diddle the odds of safe removal of the USB. The EJECT option, as noted, issues an I/O FLUSH command to that device - and that means that all writes in the write-back queue get written before you get the notification.
On larger O/S setups, this is called a "DISMOUNT" operation.
I've never ejected my usb drives, had them for years.
I forget their was an eject button, and they're perfectly fine
More than 15 years of computer usage and never ejected my USB stick ... never had corrupted files or whatever.
It would make more sense for HDDs/SSDs, which have on demand files running on it, like for example a logger, server files, server engines (apache, XAMPP and Co.) and thus unplugging the drive without ejecting might cause issues, since, if you even don't write anything on them, the main frame (OS on a drive directly plugged via SATA for example) will recall for data, ping those USB/TB/whatever plugged-in drives and might lose the string after those drives getting unplugged without a completed procedure.
Ejecting USB sticks ... makes no sense to me. They are not designed for running a system or store important or credential on-demand files on it, necessary for a OS or any other application on the desk. If that is necessary, you simply avoid putting data to your USB stick anyways and leave them next to your application's range.
If I do that in Windows 7/8/10, next time when I plug the drive in, windows will ask for File System Check. Happend to me with different PCs and drives, even if the check result will be "no problems found"
if you plug it out during the write process, then the files get broken and some major operating systems can not handle that without breaking :-)
You are lucky. I have had a job where we worked heavily with data on USB drives. I have corrupted many by not removing them. Just because you are lucky does not prevent the good idea of properly ejecting.
Not ejecting your USB drives is like randomly making someone go into labor like "you're taking to long to have that baby, yank" and now you have a metaphorical corrupted fetus.
"Answer is a definite probably" -Linus
Every time I click eject USB drive, the windows doesn't let me, so I have to forcefully pull it out.
1:09
OS: Writing this file to the USB drive D:...
You: [Pulls out the USB stick]
OS: Hey! Where's the USB gone?! I still have half a [censored]-ing file to write!
"If you pull it out, before your computer finished..."
7 million views, lol, that's a little optimistic 0:11
WE HAVE TO GET IT TO 7.2M+ VIEWS.
For those of you wondering, corrupted data by yanking your USB is very rare on a desktop. Manufacturers have done a pretty good job catching those issues and making flash drives mindless to use.
However, you WILL see these types of corruption issue more often when saving information from an Android smartphone onto a flash drive. As Linus mentioned, Linux has write caching enabled by default so it is also enabled on Android as well. Some Android versions also don't have the ability to eject the drive. I had this happen to me when I was moving a .txt file from one tablet to another with my trusty keychain flash drive that convert between Mini-usb, USB 2, USB Type C. The file ended up corrupted during the process for basically no reason. I didn't know why it did that until I watched this video. lol
For the record, I first made sure that I could open the file on the phone after it was loaded onto the flash drive. It opened just fine. I unplug the drive, plug it into the other phone and sure enough it was corrupt. I did the same exact process a second time, and it worked. So yes, Write Caching is a bitch.
But what if it doesn't want to eject saying that it is in use?
Then just restart your computer. Or better yet, Shut Down the computer, and when you know that the computer has completely shut down, pull the drive out, and turn your computer back on.
close any suspected programs using the drive and it will allow you to eject. Outlook does this all the time
Protecting whatever data it is working on at that time is exactly what ejecting a USB is supposed to protect. Wait until it's done with whatever it's doing then trying ejecting it again... or risk losing the data.
Check your antivirus isn't still scanning it
If It's on windows, go to the task manager and restart explorer. On MacOS, restart Finder from the Command+Option+Escape Menu, I don't know the Linux equivalent.
Try story happened to friend of mine 1:25
You're very *try* -ing
Oh, I never knew you’re supposed to eject it. Thanks.
I've had more corruption on my sd card than a usb stick and that never leaves my phone.
I haven’t given my soul to cortana 😉😉
I have gave my soul to Linux forever.
i use linux
Quite a few people are too rough when they remove the drive from the port anyway. Lesson: fully eject, make sure your'e not transferring or saving data, and be gentle with your drives.
Chuck Norris rips his flash drive out of the socket without even hitting Eject.
Nope. The computer asks chuck norris if he wants eject the flash drive or not.
Chuck Norrris doesn't need a flash drive to save data. It just simply stored into him. The same can be said when uploading data. It simply comes into the computer whenever he please.
Why don't Android phones have an eject option even if it's in mass storage mode?
So you can lose all the data on it then become homeless and live in a box.
You can use the same storage on the phone and on the PC same time. Old android phones ejected the storage when you plugged it into PC (you couldn't access your pics etc on your phone at the same time) and you needed to eject it on the PC before disconnecting it.
Nowadays I don’t think they bother with mass-storage mode any more, instead they use MTP.
Have a galaxy s6 on my desk rn, and you can absolutely eject it from your computer. It's seen as a removable media device by my windows 8 laptop, and my windows 10 computer. Do the same thing as usual for a usb drive, go to "safely remove media" and Select "Galaxy s6 Media Device". Same thing works for any iPhone I've ever had as well. It also depends on how you connect your phone, if it's seen as just charging, it wont even show up in the media devices
They do have an eject option, it's in the settings.
Some programs will keep your USB flashdrive "in use" even after you close a file. Acrobat does that so it can open other files faster. It keeps scanning the drive until after after you close the program.
I still have a DVD Burner on my PC
me too
Yeah me too. I've got lots of old cd's with photos, videos, games and softwares on them. Maybe someday I should backup them on cloud.
dropped in to give a short answer.
yes. yes you do need to eject unless you wanna end up losing all your data like I have on multiple occasions.
Yeah. Happened to me. We use USB's very frequently for Product Key Injection and DMI tools, boot media etc. Closed all the programs I was using, pulled it out. When I went to use it, it wouldn't work. So, either it wasn't ACTUALLY finished using it, or the drive decided to die at that precise moment.
Either way, I've ejected since then, and haven't had an issue. It takes 5 seconds at most,m but saves me a lot of frustration.
Josh eh. I'm 21 and I am gentle as an angel with my devices. I've used all sorts of Sandisk USB sticks and SD cards and a couple of Samsung SD cards and if I removed without ejecting on a regular basis it would eventually or quickly lose data. I've only done it on Windows XP-10 computers and I've never had issues with ejecting. odd that you have. maybe it's because you've previously removed without ejecting and in doing so corrupted data by ejecting?? idk I'm not *that* smart. ah well :P
What about in2020?
i knew all of this, but i still enjoyed watching linus "yank it out" at 00:30
When you push the eject button on a CD/DVD drive, the hardware tells the OS to finish up things and dismount the drive and eject.
Yep. Linus giving inaccurate data again.
Well, he didn’t give incorrect data, but he didn’t give the correct data either. He just left us hanging..