With a write cache, your computer will finish the copying process in the background. “But it’s actually not made it to the drive yet.” “When you write to the drive, it will actually just write it into memory, and then come back to you and say, ‘yeah I wrote it,’” says Andy Pavlo, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The cache is just local memory storage that your computer is really good at writing to, quickly. Your machine may actually be using something called a write cache instead of transfering the file from one device to the other directly, it’s using that cache to make the process more efficient.
Say you’re copying a file from your computer to a USB drive. What could go wrong?įirst, some context, and the bad possibilities. It’s worth taking a look at what’s happening behind the scenes when you remove a thumb drive, and why it’s unlikely to mess up much, if anything. Granted, that’s anecdotal evidence, but he estimates that the vast majority of the time, “for the average user, nothing bad would happen.” “I’ve been pulling out thumb drives since the last five years and I haven’t had a problem,” says Frank Wang, a PhD candidate in computer science at MIT. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or-even more unlikely-the entire storage device. That’s not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. Pull a USB flash drive out of your Mac without first clicking to eject it, and you’ll get a stern, shameful warning: “Disk Not Ejected Properly.”īut do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way?
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