Hi there, I connected perfectly healthy Seagate mini 2 TB USB drive to my Synology DS923+ NAS drive. I moved files back and forth and everything was fine and dandy until I just unplugged a drive and went to connect it to my iMac. Sure, NAS software said, next time unmount drive before unplugging it. But that was after the fact. Mac can’t see it no matter what. In Disk utility it’s there but can’t be mounted, erased, formatted, read or written. What can I do? Will PC be better in connecting to that drive. As of now it acts bricked.
It’s fine on most if not all USB thumb drives nowadays. Windows has disabled its write cache on removable devices since like 2016. It was more annoying than anything anyway since the cache just soaked up all the writes into system memory with no throttling. Then you could be sitting there for half an hour not knowing the progress of the writes on the drive if it was a slow flash drive.
For external SSDs it’s a must to do a safe removal since the drive’s write cache will almost always be enabled, or if it’s disabled the drive’s performance will tank. Not sure about DRAM-less SSDs though. Also, SSDs can corrupt more than just the data being modified, so the stakes are higher.
For external SMR hard drives the write cache will always be enabled since they basically can’t function without it, so it would be a good idea to do a safe removal then. Plus the drive gets shutdown cleanly. A surprise power cut makes the head slam back with the residual energy from the spinning platters and I’ve seen it kill a couple drives.
TL;DR thumb drives you can just yank on windows, everything else you should probably do a safe removal