Is it save to remove a USB drive without unmounting?

[michae...@googlemail.com]

Hi,
so Alt-F is nice and I am starting to show it to the Misses.
She likes being able to access her data on a USB disk connected to the NAS over the net and all, but she is not to fond of having to unmount the drive in the web-interface, before unplugging it from the NAS.
So my question is:
Is it save to remove the drive without previous unmounting? If not by default (due to buffer, cache or what-not), can it be made safe, by changing some configs?
The drive is an NTFS drive, which, coincidentally she can only access read-only from her macbook by default, whereas from the NAS it works without a hitch (hurray for Linux!)...
Yeah, yeah, I know you can mount it read-write in OSX also, but then were back to the potential troubles of technology (I have tried it)...

[João Cardoso]

No, it is not safe. Under all OS you need to "Safe remove" or "eject" it.

Under Alt-F, you have four possibilities:

1-Use the webUI to eject

2-Use the 'eject usb' command line (as root)

3-Press the recessed reset back button for a couple of seconds

4-force mounting as RO

-So 1 and 2 is not Misses friendly :-)

-for 3 it's convenient to glue a small cylindrical plastic to the recessed button to make it behave as a normal protruded button. The press action for a couple of seconds (until the amber front leds start both blinking, *less* than 10 seconds), tries to unmount the USB disk, but there is no indication if it succeeds or not. If there are open files, the unmount will fail.

-for 4 you have to go to Disk->Filesystems and, with the disk plugged and mounted, change its "Mount Options" to 'ro', and then select "Set mnt options" under "FS operations". In the future that drive (and only it) will be mounted read-only and it should be safe to unplug, but check it yourself for NTFS. You have to save settings to store the mount options.