unplugging an external ssd...

[fisherking]

i know it's not right, but have twice unplugged my 12" macbook when my backup ssd was still mounted. i understand there's nothing to spin down (as there would be with a traditional hard drive), but... will i go to hell if i keep doing this? (or will the ssd have some sort of meltdown)?

just curious (i am going to try to do better)....

 

[lolasher]

Unmounting isn't detach device at driver level, you detach logical volume residing at that storage device telling operating system it should wrap up any I/O operations currently in process. I even have external drive enclosure which still spins after unmount. While I wouldn't be worried about breaking physical disk, unplugging without unmounting may lead to data or filesystem corruption sometimes making it unmountable until scanning with repair tool. It's worth noticing operating system may conduct scheduled indexing or late buffered write without any visible tell (other than blinking led indicator if drive is equipped with one) so is good practice to unmount even when you know that you aren't writing anything at the moment.

 

[fisherking]

no power nap (no time machine; i use carbon copy cloner). it's the damn macbook with it's one usb port; i have an anker hub, that brings AC power to the mac AND an external ssd.

will treat it with the same respect (and fear) i've always shown spinning drives....

 

[Fishrrman]

You DO NOT want to disconnect ANY drive until you drag its icon into the trash first to "unmount" it.

Sometimes you can get away with this.
Other times, the results may not be so good...