![]() As long as the LED is not flashing, it is safe to unplug the drive. It’s easy to see when some USB flash drives are in use because they have a built-in LED that flashes when data is read or written. ![]() RELATED: Do You Really Need to Safely Remove USB Drives? Get a reader with an LED You’ll also need to make sure write caching isn’t enabled for the drive, but more on that in a bit. However, Microsoft insists that as long as the “Fast Removal” system policy is selected and you are not writing data to a drive, you do not have to eject it. The only way to avoid this is to “safely” remove the drive. If you unplug the drive and interrupt these processes, it could cause a problem. A background process can write to it or a program can save to it automatically. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to tell if your computer is writing to a drive. So, before unplugging a USB flash drive from your PC, make sure that all files have finished being copied or saved. This interrupts the write operation and the file being written or copied will be incomplete or may remain a corrupt file. Generally, the biggest threat to data when removing a USB flash drive (like a thumb drive, hard drive, etc.) is unplugging it while data is being written to it.
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