I guess I know the answer to this but I thought I would ask anyway
Obviously if you are in Windows you need to click the remove hardware safely option
However, ROCK is not Windows based so in order to remove an external drive/stick do I have to power down the ROCK or will just pulling it out cause potential issues?
TIA
Depends on the file system, but it is always a better idea to shut the ROCK down.
With NTFS drives there WILL be issues after pulling it from a running ROCK (most likely the disk won’t work again on the ROCK until after a chkdsk /f is run on Windows to clean it, because it will carry an “unsafely removed” flag), and if using Linux ext4fs it’s not the greatest idea either.
With exFAT one might get away with it (until one doesn’t), assuming that there are no active transfers at the time.
In the end, if you want to be safe, then yes, power down ROCK gracefully. And then, pull the drive.