'Symptoms could include: Lost data, corrupted filesystems, crashing programs, or hanging computers requiring a reboot.' This means if a program on your computer is just reading a file and not actually saving any information to the drive, it's probably not going mess things up too much for the files on your USB stick if you suddenly yank it out.īut you do risk confusing your computer, says Remaker. It expects the files on it to remain accessible indefinitely and this changes the way it interacts with a flash drive.
Īs Phillip Remaker explained over at Quora (in a response that now has more than 92,000 views), our operating systems have been programmed to treat our external drives - like USB sticks - like they'll always be there. In fact, waiting those extra 30 seconds to safely eject could help to properly save your data and software.īut the risk really depends on your operating system, and what you're actually doing with your USB Drive. Well, we've done a little background research, and it turns out that it does.