how to safely remove drive?

Question

When I right click on my disk, I have a "safely remove drive" option that appears. When I "safely remove drive", the disk icon goes off, before coming back in a second later. I can hear the disk that start spinning again. which tells me it might actually not be that safe to remove the disk at this stage.

Answer 1

The safely remove drive option is there to flush the cache to the drive so that no data that was being written to the drive will be lost. After the cache has been flushed to the drive it should be safe to pull the drive after that.

You could try syncing the drive before unmounting so the drive cache is flushed before you unplug it, as that should give you the same effect. Open a terminal window and type in the following to unmount the drive:

mount

will show all attached drives.

Example of mounted drives:

~$ mount

/dev/sdd1 on /media/WD500GB type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda1 on /media/Seagate type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sde1 on /media/500GB type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)

mine is named /media/Seagate for my external USB drive. To unmount it, just type in the following, minus the 1 on the end of the device name, but running sync to flush the cache that might be in the buffers first:

~$ sync

~$ sudo umount /dev/sda

this will cause the drive flush the cache to the drive itself, then unmount from the operating system making it safe to remove from the system.