[SOLVED] External SSD Hot Swapping-Problematic?

[exzou]

I had someone tell me the other day that there was no harm in unplugging their External SSD before telling Windows to "Safely Remove" the device. At first, I was adamant that they were wrong. I believed there could be issues with data loss or even wear and tear issues. However, the person said they were confident that all data transfers had completed and that the External SSD was idle. Upon considering this, I couldn't come up with a reason this would be problematic. Was the other person correct. Is there no risk of data loss/physical damage from disconnecting an External SSD which is done with data transfers?

 

[Solandri]

You used to be right. The default in Windows used to be that writes sent to external drives were cached. This resulted in faster writes (their order/amount could be optimized in the cache before being sent to the drive). But if you yanked the drive out, data still in the cache hadn't yet been written. Ejecting the drive ("safely remove") flushed the cache, thus guaranteeing that all data had been written.

Starting with Windows 10 v1809, Microsoft changed the default to the write cache being off. Writes are slower (unless you manually enable write caching). But when Windows says the copy is finished, you can be sure that the copy is truly finished and there's no more data still lingering in the cache, and that it's safe to disconnect the drive.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...default-removal-policy-external-storage-media

I'd still eject whenever possible though, since you never know if the write cache has been enabled somehow. (e.g. Certain USB drives report themselves to Windows as being an internal drive. And Windows still defaults to enabling write cache for those. Although I believe Windows won't even give you the eject option for these drives. Been a while since I encountered one so I don't recall how I ejected it.) You also usually won't know if the Win 10 version someone is using is v1809 or newer. If they're still on an older version, then yanking the drive out can still corrupt data.

 

[CountMike]

I had someone tell me the other day that there was no harm in unplugging their External SSD before telling Windows to "Safely Remove" the device. At first, I was adamant that they were wrong. I believed there could be issues with data loss or even wear and tear issues. However, the person said they were confident that all data transfers had completed and that the External SSD was idle. Upon considering this, I couldn't come up with a reason this would be problematic. Was the other person correct. Is there no risk of data loss/physical damage from disconnecting an External SSD which is done with data transfers?

I stopped doing Safe removal for long time (years) now, just wait few seconds to finish any writing to it, never had a problem.