Seriously. Flash drives aren’t all that reliable, however you eject them.

There’s no reason to keep things just on a flash drive. I can’t believe the number of people I’ve met who do this.

If you absolutely must keep things *just* on removable media (perhaps because you think it’s more secure and you don’t want to leave copies on various different computers) then keep two separate copies on two separate drives, at least.

Flash drives _will_ get corrupted or fail at some point.

The good news: Usually, most of the data lost on a corrupted drive can be recovered.

The bad news: Experience tells me that people who don’t understand the inherent fragility of flash drives will often quickly make such recovery impossible by ill-informed attempts to make a corrupted drive work again. Then they’ll probably blame whatever operating system they were using at the time.

Semi-technical explanation: Your flash drive stores stuff in lots of separate blocks. These blocks aren’t necessarily the same as file system blocks, but the idea’s the same. Each block has a limited lifetime of write cycles. To cope with failing blocks, most flash memory maintains a “pool” of spare blocks. The blocks which most often get written to are the ones which store the file system metadata. When a block fails, the flash drive transparently maps a good (but empty) block in from the spare pool. Sticking a bunch of zeros in the middle of your filesystem metadata doesn’t kill your files, but it stops your operating system finding them. If you re-format the drive, it will work just fine, as if nothing was ever wrong (but you’ll lose your files, probably).

Ideally, when using flash drives, you should copy everything off them now and then and re-format them and copy things back – if you’re lucky, this will put file system metadata in different places, or at least shift the most frequently access stuff elsewhere. (Some expensive drives shuffle things around transparently all the time, to level the wear – these drives are the best and most robust, also the most expensive and probably a bit slower.)

How often it’s wise to re-format these things depends on how may write operations you normally do – remember though that e.g. updating file access timestamps is a file system write operation, even when just reading files. Every month or two should be fine.

The real rule, however, in case it isn’t obvious, is DON’T TRUST ANY SINGLE DRIVE WITH A SINGLE COPY OF IRREPLACEABLE DATA. That applies to all kinds of drives, not just flash drives, but flash drives are especially prone to failure.

After 20 minutes, I surf for solutions. As advised by curmi to ignore that the light is still on, I pulled out the thumb drive. A warning message came out saying that the disk was not removed properly and data could be lost. I put the drive back in and click ok. The light flashed a few times and then stopped.

I waited a few minutes and pulled it out. (Note: there’s no thumb drive icon on the desktop). The warning message came out again, I put it back again. The light flashed on a few times and then stopped.

I checked out the finder and clicked on the thumb drive icon at the sidebar. The desktop showed the icon as well. So I drag the icon to the trash, and this time I managed to remove the thumb drive safely. When I checked the data, all seems ok.

I think it is better to eject by dragging the thumb drive icon to the trash rather than using the eject button on the finder’s thumb drive icon.

Or make an alias to it, and call it temp. Or a link from the terminal (ln -s).

Can anyone help me in this?

I’m a Windows developer turned Mac guy, so I completely understand your point of view. What tripped me up at first with my Mac was the lack of notifications that things worked — like the bubble popping up saying the drive was disconnected, for instance.

My first gotcha was with printers. I hooked mine up, got no notifications whatsoever. I assumed it wasn’t even detecting it, so I googled for awhile. Found nothing. Decided to try to print anyway — everything worked, first try.

The mental context switch you have to make is this:

In Windows, you assume something fails unless it explicitly tells you it worked. Like the bubble popup you mentioned.

In Mac, you assume something works unless it explicitly tells you it failed.

Once I realized this, my Mac experience improved greatly and I began to see some of the shortcomings of Windows that I didn’t even know were there. Don’t get me wrong, Mac has its shortcomings as well — Finder stinks. Period.

But overall, if you let your Windows habits and mind frame fall away, you’ll enjoy your Mac much more :)

diskTool -e disk2

is what I need to run to eject my usb HD. Use -l to list the attached drives:

diskTool -l

You’ll probably see quite a few listings, pluck out what is needed for your setup. You can also remount the usb HD using that same tool with a different switch:

diskTool -m disk2

But it doesn’t show up until we refresh things:

diskTool -r

So, to eject:

diskTool -e disk2

To remount:

diskTool -m disk2
diskTool -r

You can create applescripts out of those if you like, so you can tie it into Quicksilver triggers easily:

Eject:

do shell script “diskTool -e disk2″

Mount:

do shell script “diskTool -m disk2″
do shell script “diskTool -r”

I bind the eject script to Option-E and mount script to Option-M. It’s not the quickest, but it lets me connect/disconnect drives with a simple keystroke, regardless of which app I’m in.

I know, compared to world hunger this is a small thing, but still…

It is really simple on the Mac. When you put the flash drive in, it appears as a drive. It will be on your desktop, and in any Finder window you open.

To eject it safely, you drag it to the trash (which turns in to an eject icon), or click the eject icon next to the drive in the left hand side of the finder.

When it is no longer there, you pull it out. That’s pretty simple.

Ignore that the light is still on. That just shows there is power to the drive. It is no longer on the desktop or the finder as you’ve seen (“THE ICON HAS DISAPPEARED”). That means you can eject it.

Because it doesn’t work the same as Windows doesn’t mean it is wrong or worse than Windows. It means it is different. You need to learn those differences, not complain that it doesn’t work like Windows. Windows is definitely not better in this regard.

Ron, if you’re new to OS X, you might not know that if you delete something on your thumb drive, it goes to a special trash on your thumb drive. If you just eject the drive, the file is still in existence on your USB drive. Next time you put the drive in, it will be in the trash can. If you pull the drive out, it will no longer be in the trash can that you see in the Dock. I mention this because I’ve found lots of new Mac users get confused by this behaviour (no idea what Windows does in these cases).

The reason she didn’t know about “ejecting” a volume was that Windows doesn’t use that antequated idea. Removable media is just that – hot swappable and *removable*.