Resolved Best practices for USB devices

I have always used Windows (in the system tray) to stop an external hard drive, before I pull it out of the USB port, but I have never done this when pulling out the USB cable for a cooling pad, or a wireless mouse.

Should I always go through this habit, before pulling any USB device out of its port? I was reading somewhere that not doing this could damage the USB port itself.

 

Agree with Steve on that. Stopping any USB drive would flush the data so that everything is written on it/from it.

Any other USB device, which does not does any I/O of this sort should be perfectly save to pull/unplug without stopping it first.

 

Great. This is what I've always done, but I read the other day that you can damage other devices as well. Thanks for refuting that.

 

It depends on the device as noted above. If you right click on the device and work your way through properties to get to that device's Polices menu, you can set the device to "Quick removal" to disable write caching so you don't have to go through the Safely Remove Hardware menu. For drives, this setting may impact performance a bit, however.