01-11-2015, 06:20 PM
Unplugging a storage device before dismounting it on pretty much any operating system, including Windows, is a BAD PLAN.
As rotating (as opposed to solid-state) disks are inherently slow devices, operating systems tend to use a "write back" cache - when you write data to a disk, its actually written to a bit of memory and the user programme gets immediate confirmation of the write being complete...
...however, the data is actually in volatile memory - the operating system writes the data to physical disk in the background whilst the user programme goes on its way...
The big upside of this approach is that write I/O intensive applications run very fast.
The BIG downside is that if the power fails (and there is no UPS) or the DISK IS REMOVED UNEXPECTEDLY (!!) then that data is essentially lost and the disk will possibly become corrupt.
You should check your disk structure & repair it if necessary as soon as is possible.
It is possible to change the cache type to "write though", where the user application has to wait until the data is physically written to disk, but that will make most applications that write to files run very slow - note that these setting are on a SYSTEM, not application level, i.e. you change the settings, it effects everyone and everything.
Note that there are at least two types of disk corruption: Corruption of the file system data structures, i.e. directories/folders etc. and then there's file corruption where the contents of a file which has an internal stucture, e.g. an Outlook PST file, becomes corrupt.
The first type of corruption can be fixed by chkdsk and other similar utilities; the second is more subtle as its application dependent, so you need a tool related to that application to fix it, e.g. Outlook has SCANPST.EXE to repair the internal structure of PST files.
Never, ever, remove a running storage device - if you do so, all bets are off. You may be lucky, but generally something subtle and nasty happens that may only manifest itself later, generally when you really really don't need it to
As rotating (as opposed to solid-state) disks are inherently slow devices, operating systems tend to use a "write back" cache - when you write data to a disk, its actually written to a bit of memory and the user programme gets immediate confirmation of the write being complete...
...however, the data is actually in volatile memory - the operating system writes the data to physical disk in the background whilst the user programme goes on its way...
The big upside of this approach is that write I/O intensive applications run very fast.
The BIG downside is that if the power fails (and there is no UPS) or the DISK IS REMOVED UNEXPECTEDLY (!!) then that data is essentially lost and the disk will possibly become corrupt.
You should check your disk structure & repair it if necessary as soon as is possible.
It is possible to change the cache type to "write though", where the user application has to wait until the data is physically written to disk, but that will make most applications that write to files run very slow - note that these setting are on a SYSTEM, not application level, i.e. you change the settings, it effects everyone and everything.
Note that there are at least two types of disk corruption: Corruption of the file system data structures, i.e. directories/folders etc. and then there's file corruption where the contents of a file which has an internal stucture, e.g. an Outlook PST file, becomes corrupt.
The first type of corruption can be fixed by chkdsk and other similar utilities; the second is more subtle as its application dependent, so you need a tool related to that application to fix it, e.g. Outlook has SCANPST.EXE to repair the internal structure of PST files.
Never, ever, remove a running storage device - if you do so, all bets are off. You may be lucky, but generally something subtle and nasty happens that may only manifest itself later, generally when you really really don't need it to
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