What is more important to you? Saving a few seconds because you are late for class or ensuring you don’t lose that file you just saved, having worked on it for the past six hours and it’s due on the teacher’s desk the moment you get to school?
I have formed the habit of ALWAYS ejecting my USB drive (after writing files to it) before unplugging it (except in Win98SE, where it not even an option) because I did lose files a few times. FWIW, I don’t know that WinXP actually requires it, but discovering that the critical files I retrieved from a customers’ PC aren’t there when I get back to my office is somewhat annoying.
I’d avoid it. If delayed write is turned on, all indications may show that your data was saved to your USB key (or flash card, or whatever), but it actually hasn’t been.
If it’s a constant problem, I’d check out this article (which purports to be for flash cards, but may affect USB storage devices also), or turn off delayed write for your removable device - probably with steps similar to this.
I talk about this at some length, including instructions on how to make it safe, here.
Bottom line: You can make it safe to just yank them when they’re not actually writing, but it’s probably not turned on by default, and the setting is a little hard to find.
My friend yanked her drive out of a computer a little too soon in info sys last year and ended up with a drive full of “ghost” files, that had icons displayed but were 0 bytes and could not be opened. Among the ghost files was her write-up for one of her tasks :smack:
If you value what you have on the drive, you should always dismount before yanking.