On Fri, 20 May 2011 07:43:37 -0700 (PDT), "William R. Walsh"
wrote:

Hi!

A) If you haven't written to the flash drive for, say, 10 minutes, and
you know all your writes concluded 10 minutes ago, do you really have
to use that procedure?

It's a very good idea if you have changed the option to allow Windows
to perform write-caching against the device in question. By default,
Windows does not enable write-caching against removable storage
devices.

You may not have written anything to the drive, but:

A) you don't know if the operating system or an application has/is/
will be writing something to the drive.
B) Windows does not police its "dirty" (write-cached data that has yet
to be written) data store all that closely. It's possible for
something to be slinging around in there for quite a while in some
cases.

William

Thanks. I'll bear this in mind and continue to use the proper
procedure to close a drive.

(I lost track of this newsgroup for a while and just got back. )