As insignificant as it may look but this is a questions that most of you don't know an answer to and even if you do you don't have reason to back it up.
Either-ways be it the question of Is it necessary to eject a USB from Mac, Linux or even Windows the answer is all the same, Yes! It sis important to safely remove a USB Flash Drive.
Why? The answer is simple, Write Caching.
When you transfer data to a Pen Drive or a portable HDD cache writing is enabled all the time keeping data in the cache memory waiting for the execution process to finish up. So when you click "eject" or "safely remove hardware" a message is sent to the cache that the process is to be terminated.
Fortunately Windows is aware of this laziness and from Windows 7 and above has enabled the "Quick Removal" option by default. To check if its enabled in your OS of not just right click on the USB drive icon in my computers and select Properties>Hardware>Properties>Policies and see if Quick Removal is selected or not.
But beware for portable HDD its not enabled and manual ejection of the USB flash drive is necessary in such cases. Obviously you don't want to throw away your GBs ot TBs of important data into the trash bin just because you didn't eject the drive.
The more cautious among us, who would describe frightening stories of damaged cells, will say that you should always, always safely remove any kind of USB drive. My technical advice: Live a little. When it comes to smaller USB drives, I don't bother. It's not like I'm transferring top secret files of which there's only one copy. The worst that might happen is that I corrupt some data and transfer it again, or have to reformat the drive. Not too scary, and if your flash drive ever dies, it probably wasn't because you didn't click "safely remove hardware" every time. Exposure to heat, physical damage, and wear from writing data and plugging/unplugging (USB plugs only last for so long) are far more likely to hurt it. Keep your big external drives safe by safely ejecting them, but there's no need to be nervous about removing a USB stick as long as you've let any transfers complete.
Either-ways be it the question of Is it necessary to eject a USB from Mac, Linux or even Windows the answer is all the same, Yes! It sis important to safely remove a USB Flash Drive.
Why? The answer is simple, Write Caching.
When you transfer data to a Pen Drive or a portable HDD cache writing is enabled all the time keeping data in the cache memory waiting for the execution process to finish up. So when you click "eject" or "safely remove hardware" a message is sent to the cache that the process is to be terminated.
But beware for portable HDD its not enabled and manual ejection of the USB flash drive is necessary in such cases. Obviously you don't want to throw away your GBs ot TBs of important data into the trash bin just because you didn't eject the drive.
The more cautious among us, who would describe frightening stories of damaged cells, will say that you should always, always safely remove any kind of USB drive. My technical advice: Live a little. When it comes to smaller USB drives, I don't bother. It's not like I'm transferring top secret files of which there's only one copy. The worst that might happen is that I corrupt some data and transfer it again, or have to reformat the drive. Not too scary, and if your flash drive ever dies, it probably wasn't because you didn't click "safely remove hardware" every time. Exposure to heat, physical damage, and wear from writing data and plugging/unplugging (USB plugs only last for so long) are far more likely to hurt it. Keep your big external drives safe by safely ejecting them, but there's no need to be nervous about removing a USB stick as long as you've let any transfers complete.
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