Can You Unplug Your USB Stick When You Want?

“Safely eject USB stick before unplugging it” – This is the normal protocol that you are strongly suggested follow when you wish to unplug your USB stick. This holds true regardless of whether it is on windows or Linux or Mac OS. Why is this protocol a must? Can’t you just unplug your USB stick whenever you want? What is the process behind this protocol? In this article, we try to explore answers to these questions. We shall try to do this in a manner in which anyone can understand the reasons without needing to have a technical background.

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Packing For a Vacation

Let’s say that you are packing your stuff for vacation in your luggage, and it’s the evening on which you take your flight or train. You have packed everything that you will need in the vacation. Yet, there still remain some critical items that you still need during the time of your packing. They will be the last ones that will be packed into the luggage, and the packing is not complete without them.

Now imagine that someone from your family comes in and says that it is high time you left for the flight / train. Now, as a last-minute activity, you pick up these critical items and then pack them in before you leave.

Had you packed in these critical items much earlier, you would have had to search for them in the luggage, and potentially pack them in and take them out again and again. With such a packing approach, you know that you pack them in at the last moment, where you know you are leaving for sure.

Ejecting Your USB Stick

In a manner similar to our packing example, when we plug in a USB stick into a computer, the device unpacks a bunch of critical items onto the computer that make its functioning easier. This is technically known in the industry as caching. Usually, as the USB stick’s states change in relation to the computer, the information from the cache is updated and written onto the USD stick.

If you choose to unplug the device randomly, you run the risk of unplugging it during a read / write operation, which might lead to corrupted data. On the other hand, if you go through with the protocol and click ‘Safely Eject / Remove’ before unplugging it, the USB stick gets the message first. It then communicates with the computer, and sends programs to look for all the unpacked critical stuff that it left lying around. The programs gather the critical stuff (data) lying around, and then pack them neatly back into the USB stick. At the end of the process, the USB stick says “Bye Bye!” to the computer, and from this point on, the USB stick is ‘ready to depart’ without the risk of data corruption during data read / write operations.

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Further reading that might interest you: Are We Living in a Simulation and 5 Reasons Not To Hate Mathematics.