Deals.Woot

Solid state drives do not write in batches like regular harddrives do. Therefore if you do not safely remove, you risk pulling it out in the middle of a read/write operation and ruining all the memory.

That being said, safely removing it ensures there are no r/w operations currently happening and the drive stops getting power so you can pull it out with no worries.

In short, do it

For flash drives, never. For everything else, always.

@benyust2: There is a difference in Windows if you left-click or right-click. Left click drops down a list of items to remove, once clicked that's it. If you right click, there are 4 clicks at that point, as it has to open a dialog. 2 Clicks is too much? Talk about First World problems. Sheesh.

Having been the victim of losing all my data on my flash drive, because I couldn't get it to remove properly, I always try to safely remove, even flash drives. Wait until it happens to you!

@mrmucox: @mrmucox: I have a few XP machines, a few Vista's and one Windows 7 and the left click method rarely works on any of them. I do use the remove hardware function if I know that I need a file on there that I won't be able to get again. But, I have just pulled out the drive many time (after closing everything on the drive of course) and I've never lost anything that I'm aware of.

Every time. I have seen people lose way to much stuff by not waiting a few extra seconds and clicking that icon.

I'm not telling everyone who does it that they're an idiot, but I am saying that after over 10 years of just ripping them out, I've never ever experienced adverse effects or loss of memory or anything on my hard drives (and one of them is a 7 year old 250GB external that still runs like a champ).
I stopped to count, and over these 10 years I've run at least 20 externals this way, and nearly 20 flash drives. The only reason they don't all still serve me is I've either dropped, misplaced, or turned them into a permanent part of a desktop.
Conservatively speaking, if it's saved me 3 seconds a day; that's 3 hours of my life that I've saved from staring at pixels and waiting.
Just rip it out.

never... and I always hit on 19 whnen playing blackjack!

I try to but some times Windows gives me the always helpful "cannot be stopped right now" message, and I'll yank it if I'm in a hurry.
Windows is stupid in that you can't force an unmount without invoking checkdisk. Seriously who thought this was a good idea?

I like to remove hardware while standing on a tall ladder, barefoot in the rain holding a toaster..it just makes it better that way :-)