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iPod - Please add "Eject iPod" button

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JimH:
We don't think that ejecting is necessary provided you're not unplugging in the middle of a synch. 

glynor:
I have certainly corrupted data unplugging a USB flash drive immediately AFTER writing data to it (after the light had stopped blinking), when using Windows 2000.  I don't have a flash or drive based MP3 player, so I've never experienced that (but I bet it would be the same too).

Windows XP is good about obeying the "disable write caching" flag (it's also much better about automatically deciding that most removable drive types should be "quick disconnect" drives).  Write caching can certainly bite you though, especially with older operating systems (and with disk media that you've intentionally enabled write caching on for performance reasons).

The reason is that to speed disk access (particularly writes) Windows will not always save data to the physical media exactly when you tell it to.  It'll sometimes "save up" a number of writes to a RAM buffer and then flush them all out at once in a big burst.  This is a good technique for speeding up disk writes on most hard drives, but it's not such a good plan when you might unplug the drive at any second because the write could be only half-way done (leaving files in nowhere land).  Windows XP is pretty smart and automatically disables write caching on all removable media.  Windows 2000 wasn't always so smart (and doesn't always properly obey the flag anyway).

Moral is, it's generally safest to always "eject" the media before unplugging it.  On XP it's generally unnecessary unless you've mucked with the "Write Caching and Safe Removal" settings in the Device Manager.  On other older OSes, YMMV.

lalittle:

--- Quote from: JimH on July 08, 2006, 11:11:38 pm ---We don't think that ejecting is necessary provided you're not unplugging in the middle of a synch. 

--- End quote ---

The problem is that windows has a tendency to do things when you might not be expecting it, which "can" (but not necessarily "will") cause problems.  For example, it's possible for a drive to still be writing even after an application says it's done.  A virus scanner can step in the way and slow the writing process down a bit, which can lead to such an issue if you eject a drive too soon after writing.  I won't argue that you might never run into such a situation, but regardless of whether it's absolutely "necessary" or not, in my opinion it's simply safer to just wait until the unit is ejected.  This way, you're SURE to avoid any potential issues. 

All that aside, you get an error message if you disconnect without ejecting first.  To me, it's worth ejecting just to avoid this message, which may startle many people.

Larry

LonWar:
I think having a button to eject, would be better for Newbies...

In the last year, I have had to service my pod 3 times... I think I  will keep using eject... I seem to have bad luck

gpvillamil:
Eject iPod seems a good candidate for the action window.

It is an action, it can happen in parallel with other activities, and it does not have to be center of attention for the user.

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