Is It Necessary to Eject a USB Drive Properly from Mac?

How do you remove the USB drive from your computer? Just pull it out of PC or eject a USB drive properly from Mac? 

Sometimes, when you remove a USB drive without clicking to eject it firstly, you may get a warning saying “Disk Not Ejected Properly”.

Seeing this, you may ask: is it really necessary to properly eject a USB drive from the computer?

The answer is not absolute. When you are copying a file from the computer to a USB drive, you need to wait patiently until the copying process is finished. Then, after a while, you can remove the USB directly without clicking to eject it in advance.

Although yanking the USB drive rudely is not the official procedure, many of you don’t encounter some issues after doing this. Moreover, you need to pay attention to this issue: you can get a corrupted file or a damaged USB drive.

So, even you are not afraid of losing data or getting a bad USB drive, it is still necessary to know what may happen if you don’t properly eject a USB drive from your computer.

What May Go Wrong?

Firstly, we will take some context for example.

When you are copying a file from Mac to the USB drive, the machine is actually using something called write cache rather than transferring the files from one drive to another drive directly. Using the write cache is more efficient than transferring a file.

During the write process, the file is written into the drive’s memory until the process finishes. But indeed, the write process is not finished yet.

Now, if you want to remove the USB drive from your computer, you need to click on the drive icon to eject it. Then, the computer will tell the USB drive that it’s time to finish the write cache. Then, it can be finished.

In theory, write cache is the key during the whole transferring process. From the above explanation, you can know that you think the copying process finishes, but in fact, it is not. So, it is recommended to safely remove USB or properly remove a flash drive from your computer.

So, what will happen if you don’t do so?

Firstly, you may get a corrupted file after you yank the USB drive from your Mac rudely due to the copying process is finished by chance. Secondly, this rude operation may corrupt the USB drive.

If the file is damaged, it is lucky that you still have the original file. But, if the USB drive is damaged, the thing will be a little complex.

So, it is recommended to eject a USB drive properly.

How to Deal with Data Loss Issue?

It is fortunately that this professional Mac data recovery software – MiniTool Mac Data Recovery can help you to recover your files from the USB drive if you lose your data due to improperly removing method.

Also, if you encounter this issue when you are using Windows computer, you can try the free data recovery software – MiniTool Power Data Recovery which is designed run on Windows 10/8/7.