[kwlug-disc] Unmounting flash drives question

[Chris Irwin]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:47, R. Brent Clements <rbclemen at gmail.com> wrote:
> USB devices are designed to be hot-plugged.  Electrically there is no
> concern.  If the OS beleives that all of the data that needs to be
> written has been written, then unplugging is fine.  Think the
> deactiviation of the light is just a function of the design of some
> USB sticks

You will notice different behaviour on a certain proprietary operating
system where unmount and disconnect are considered to be the same
thing.

Other operating systems (at least Linux and another, less-popular but
unix-based proprietary operating system) will unmount the filesystem
but leave the device connected. This allows you to do "disk" things
(dd, fdisk, etc) safely. As long as your filesystem is not mounted,
you can yank it safely.

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>