If you just pull out the usb flash?

Question

USB

Guys. The question is tormenting: is it really so important to "Safely remove" flash drives? For many years, I just pull and that's it. But from time to time I hear some stories about a "burnt port" or a "dead flash drive". Perhaps something similar will happen (although there are also doubts), if you pull it out right during the recording, for example. I want to hear your experience. And most importantly, some reasonable arguments, and not just emotion. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Answer 1

The write process is cached. That is, if you start copying large volumes to a USB flash drive, then the message "ready" will appear before they stop pouring onto it. Naturally, nothing good will happen to the data when the device is pulled out before the recording is completed ... Similarly, if some software keeps files open on it and pull it out, the buffers may not yet be saved to it.
In principle, all this is fraught with the destruction of the file system, in a particularly unfortunate case, to the level of "the disk is not formatted."
Purely abstractly, a situation is possible when the recording process is interrupted when some service blocks are being written, after which the flash drive seems to be "killed". But it is treated with proprietary utilities. Naturally with the loss of all data on it.

Answer 2

In my opinion, safe ejecting is purely to force write anything that hasn't been written yet. It doesn't affect anything else. If nothing was written on the flash drive, then you can pull it out just like that, IMHO.
At the expense of dead flash drives: several times I encountered a "murder" when a flash drive is pulled out during the shutdown / on / reboot of the computer. It happened to me a couple of times. I restored the functionality of the flash drive by flashing the flash drive controller, the data was not restored.

Answer 3

If I'm not mistaken, "safely remove" was relevant for FAT systems. Previously, I also bothered with a safe extraction. But practice shows that garbage and irreversible consequences for the files on the flash drive and for the flash drive itself can occur in both cases. Sometimes even only when connected to the port (if the port is buggy and bites with electricity due to the assembly curve \ crooked PSU).