Copying data from one drive to another (for example, from a USB flash drive to an external hard drive) takes some time. This time depends on the “weight” of the data and the speed of the computer.
Suppose you decided to copy a movie to a USB flash drive and, without waiting for the copying to complete, removed the device from the slot. This will damage the data on the USB stick. Data corruption means that the data that you copied to the USB drive did not have time to write correctly and, therefore, probably cannot be read upon subsequent access to it.
The worst case scenario is that if you remove the drive while Windows is updating its file system, it can damage the file system. Because of this, the device will stop working altogether the next time it is connected.
Selecting the Safely Remove Hardware option notifies the operating system that you are about to remove the USB flash drive. Windows ends all processes accessing the file system and then shuts it down.
Even if it seems that the flash drive is not busy with anything (the window for copying data is not displayed), this does not mean that all work processes have ended. At this time, Windows may use a cached script.
When information needs to be written to an external drive, it is not recorded immediately. The operating system first transfers the files to the cache, and therefore already copies them to a USB flash drive – it looks like a minibus that waits at a bus stop until it has a full cabin before driving.
Of course, you can simply remove the drive and it is unlikely that this will result in data loss or damage to the media. But it’s always better to be patient and play it safe – there is nothing wrong with that.
