07-03-2011, 07:08 PM
Zoidberg wrote:
I'm still wondering why at this point in OS brainpower it's still an issue. There should be some kind of parachute, per se, for removing w/o ejecting (a la the iPhone when it's hooked up in iTunes).
Its a trade-off for performance. Buffered writes to RAM that eventually get flushed to the drive are faster. There are OS's where data reliability takes precedence and do have a write mode that does go directly and immediately to storage with all updates to metadata as well. But they are not as fast at I/O.
OS X does attempt to lessen the chance of data corruption by flushing those buffered writes every minute or so to disk. As long as the drive does not keep them in its own cache, at that point the drive could be disconnected w/o an eject. But since the mechanical connection can be disrupted at will, there is a chance every time that some data I/O is incomplete.