Really Need To Eject Flash Drive Before Taking Out?

Hi,
On a PC, you can just pull a USB Flash Drive out of a USB port, without any problems. If you do this on a Mac, it warns you of data corruption, and suggests you eject it first. But, do you REALLY need to eject via software on a Mac? Isn't it just a precaution?

I'm sorry we keep going back and forth on this. I don't know where you are getting this erroneous information from that "without a full eject first the drive may still be vulnerable."
It's really very simple. By default, the OS tries to optimize performance by delaying any requests to write data to slow devices by pooling together multiple write operations into a cache and then performing all the write operations at once (flushing the cache) when the OS determines that it has some idle time to do so. When you eject or "Safely Remove..." the device, the OS forces a cache flush command, thus immediately performing any write operations it may have not done yet. When it is done emptying the cache it displays a message that it is now safe to disconnect the device.
If you select the Fast Removal feature in the device manager, the write cache is disabled, so all data is written to the drive immediately and no cache flush is necessary. If you issue a "Safely Remove..." for a drive that has the Fast Removal option enabled, Windows simply ignores your request because there is no cache to flush. It simply skips the flush operation and immediately displays the message saying that it is now safe to disconnect the device.
There is always the possibility for data loss (especially if you do something silly like yanking the drive out while it's being written to), but if you have the Fast Removal feature enabled, ejecting or doing a "Safely Remove..." does absolutely nothing magical that will make the drive less vulnerable. Of course, there is no harm done in ejecting a Fast Removal device because your request is ignored; but if the placebo effect makes you feel you are somehow less likely to have data loss, by all means go ahead and do it.
Again, this is only for Windows. OS X does not have a Fast Removal option available from its GUI.

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