I’ll post here as it seems to affect both Macs and Windows.

From a Mac perspective, I’ve never got this. To eject a disk, you have to drag it to the trash. This made sense (kind of) for floppy disks, when the machine held on to them form grim death until you told it to spit it out. However, I’ll note that on Windows and RISC OS (at the time I started using Macs, this OS was more than a hobby OS) you could press a button on the floppy drive and the disk was spat out.

Since we’ve moved on from floppy disks, I still don’t get why I just can’t pull the cable out of the firewire socket, or just pull the USB stick out. I know the OS ucks about with closing files, but is making USB devices touch sensitive to initiate the eject automatically really necessary?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=751899

Why not write the OS to cope with such events instead? Close all open files as regular housekeeping operations.

There are settings you can change in Windows so that you don't need to eject a USB drive before removing it.

There is most probably a similar setting somewhere deep in OS X too.

never used the "safely remove harware" function in XP or vista

Under a multi-user system, you probably don't want file systems just disappearing. I'm guessing OS X inherits it's behaviour from UNIX, where you wouldn't want to take a file system away that another user might be using. Either that, or it's to stop users yanking out their USB sticks a split-second after they just pressed 'save' and then wonder why they have a corrupt document...

This used to bug me on macs as for the first few times I used them, they'd corrupt the disc, whereas I never had the problem in XP. All of my devices had a led to indicate activity so once the led stops flashing, I know I can remove the device without corrupting any data.

Pre UNIX System 7 did this too. It’s always been a feature on Macs.

I never bother ejecting sticks or external drives. The sticks I just yank out, once I've finished with them. With disk drives, I usually press the off button and let them spin down, before removing them.

I have never used 'safely remove hardware' in XP when unplugging USB memory or digital cameras and the like. Never.

no need, USB are automatically detected as hot-pluggable (on vista anyway, unsure about earlier versions), so long as you arent saving a document at the time, you can hoik it out without clicking the "safely remove device" dialogue

*edit*

the option is in device manager. open disk drives, highlight the USB device youd like to make hot-pluggable, right click, go properties > policies > check "optimise for quick removal". all internal hard drives should have "optimise for performance" checked. id assume a similar routine is undertaken for firewire devices

+1. I have yet to see any ill-effects from "yanking it out" using OS X either.

Macs bitch about you removing volumes unsafely.

So does Windows 2000, which I used at home until very recently.

I just used to yank the drive out anyway, and let it moan. Never had any data corruption.

As long as you're sensible and don't unplug drives mid-operation, there's not really a problem.

Yep, it moans about it every time. I don't care, I am teh user.

Doesn't xp moan too? With a yellow box down in the corner of the task bar?

That spot where the system loves to irritate you with all sorts of annoying messages!

Only if it's not set correctly. The XP HE has it set so you can pull out once the writing/reading has been done. XP PE doesn't. Obviously you can change the settings and if you pull out whilst write/read is happening, you can c0ck things up.