External hard drives don’t get nearly enough credit. Yanking the cable without ejectingYour hard drive hates sudden surprisesIt takes barely a second to hit the little “eject” icon, but plenty of people skip it and just tug the cable out. Eventually, that can snowball into mount errors or even force you to reformat your hard drive. Safe ejection allows your hard drive to park its read/write heads and spin down in an orderly way. Treat your external hard drive well, and it will treat your data betterThe real worth of an external drive isn’t in the little box of metal and plastic sitting on your desk.