Safely removing USB drive

[Skywalker]

Hi,

Can somebody tell me how I  can Safely remove USB Hard drive with the Sheeva Plug.
I am always affraid when I just pull out the USB plug (USB Powered Drive). I cant imagine it to be safe.

So how should I actually do this with the plug ?

Kind regards,

Luke

[dattaway]

Unmount and sync the drive first.  Usually unmounting will sync it.  They are made to hotswap.

[Skywalker]

Theoretically they are made for Hot swapping, but I wonder if the heads get the time to go to home position if you power them down. But that is another discussion.

I tried umount already, but the plug told me some process was using the drive, so I couldnt umount it.

How do I sync ? Do I first sync and then umount , or the other way around ?

Kind regards,

Luke

[dattaway]

When powered down, the hard drive motor is switched into a generator and the head instantly tracks home with plenty of rpm's to spare.  All drives made in the last 20 years should do it.

If your hard drive is busy by some process, lsof can check to see what is tying it up.  For example,

lsof /dev/sdb1

...will list the processes using that partition.  You can pipe the list of things to be killed directly to "kill" with:

kill -HUP `lsof -t /dev/sdb1`

and then

umount /dev/sdb1;sync