I wonder why one needs to use the Safety Remove Hardware tool when write caching is enabled on a disk drive, what the risks are if not doing so aside from file corruption of the files being written at the time of the disk removal. In particular, can it make the hard drive unusable?
With Write Caching, the OS buffers write requests as it wants, without you knowing, and will do them at its leisure at any time later - could be milliseconds, could be minutes later.
So when you write a file to this disk, some or all pieces might not be written, and some or all pieces of the directory and the file allocation tables might not be written either.
If you pull the device, you might be missing data in your file, or the directory it is in might miss data, or the whole disk structure might miss data. Depending on that, your disk is corrupt, and you will lose some or all data on it.
Only when you execute the 'Safely remove hardware', the OS will complete all pending writes on that disk.
