I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.
People who say this I’ll tell you what actually happens so you can know. When you tell it to safely eject all the volatile memory saved in RAM it actually writes to the permenant storage memory instead of holding it in volatile storage. Every time you yank you’re betting that its not in volatile storage anymore and was written to storage. That’s what safely eject does, forces the CPU to write to permenant storage.
Edit: the problem comes from whats doing what at what time and you will see why you can lose everything.
I simply don’t put data I care about on USB drives any more. They are all basically boot drives or a way to transfer firmware files.