I’ve always ignored the ‘remove safely’ option. I just pop it out when I’m done.

I haven’t had any problems yet.

Interesting what Raymond Chen has to say about the USB port issue. Although it doesn’t seem like a very good excuse, because Macs handle it fine. In the comments though, Raymond’s readers don’t really seem to buy it either.

RMS: I agree that there’s nothing you can do if a person yanks the drive out during the middle of the write. But as it is now, you can yank it out several minutes after the write, and you still get scolded. And if I’m not mistaken, it might not actually have flushed the write yet.

A nicer way to handle things would be if there was either a light on the drive itself, or a little icon on the taskbar, that would be red when it’s writing, and green otherwise. That way you can just glance at it to make sure it’s safe to pull out the drive, and you’d be good in all but the pathological case (yanking out the drive during the middle of the copy).

Basically, I guess I’m saying that it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just like floppy disks used to be. It was fairly obvious that you shouldn’t eject it while it was still grinding away.

And yeah projectors are a bit of a pain to set up, even for techies.

As for USB keys, there’s really nothing the OS can do if you can physically yank out the drive. The only way to avoid corruption in that case would be for the drive to have an internal power supply and memory buffer at least as big as the largest file you might want to write (so it could do a 2-stage commit). Actually that’s not so implausible…2 gigs of SD-RAM is pretty cheap these days….

There is also a configuration setting in Windows that will force it to avoid doing buffered writes to removable devices. If you turn that on, when your “file copying” progress bar disappears, you can safely yank it out without “safely removing hardware”. I do it all the time. But it makes writing to USB drives slower, so I don’t think it’s the default. Doesn’t help the “yank-out-mid-write” problem though…

The thing that really sets the projector and USB problems apart though is that even experts get burned by them. At least with the file system, as long as you understand how it works, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Ry: Well, in theory floppies have the same problem, right? The only difference is that Windows never gave you a way to unmount a floppy, and so there was no warning when you ejected “unsafely”. But you could still always hit the eject button when it was still writing. Although I guess with floppies, it was a little bit more obvious when it was still writing, due to the coffee-grinder-like sound.

I’ve always wondered about that port issue too.

Along with this topic is the Finding (supposed) New Hardware. Why is it when you plug a usb device, such as a usb mouse into a different port, it think’s it has never seen that before? On top of that, why can’t it just accept a mouse as a mouse? Do I really need to get a driver for it?

I do agree with you that there’s got to be a better way of handling this ejecting situation. Though I would lump it with other problems like the hierarchical file system (and its presentation to the user), and the non-seamlessness of computing in general.