Do I Really Need to “Eject” USB Drives?

Ever wonder why your computer warns you about ejecting those USB drives before you remove them? It’s because computers use something called write caching to improve performance: if you copy something to your drive, it’ll tell you it’s completed the task, but it’s actually waiting until it has a few other tasks to perform so it can do them all at once. Efficient, right? When you press eject, your PC finishes anything in the queue to make sure you don’t incur any data loss. Windows does a better job of avoiding problems than OS X and Linux, but we recommend ejecting all your drives anyway. It’s small price to pay for keeping your data safe.