My Thinkpad came with a program called the EasyEject Utility that makes the "safely remove hardware" step much faster and more convenient, so I use it. Prior to that, I lived dangerously.

well, usually I safely eject the devices I use.
though if it says it cant unmount it I just take it out.

I always try to safely eject hardware, but, as it's under discussion, my n900 sometimes refuses to eject, windows says its in use, when it's blatently not.

Even after waiting 5 mins of doing nothing I sometimes have to just unplug, anyone else experienced this?

I voted lol coz there is a cattle prod with the name of anyone who would dare touch my kit without written permission!

With FAT, it should be safe to pull as long as there are no write operations in progress. Keep in mind, just because there isn't a dialog telling you something is going on, there could still be something in the background you aren't aware of (such as cached writes). Ejecting syncs any pending operations to disk before letting you know it's safe. Also, some file systems don't take well to not being unmounted (they assume it means something bad happened). Personally, I play it safe and eject - I can spare a few seconds to save a few hours of recovery.

Never do. Not had any regrets over it yet, either.

On Windows (in write through mode, the default) the only thing safely remove does is ensure you don't have any application reading or writing to the device (which would mean you'd lose data).

Most other operating systems use some sort of write caching, which means that you lose information every time you eject it without unmounting first.

So you claim that as long as you aren't transferring any files on or off the storage device, you could physically take it out and it'd be the same thing as 'eject'ing?

If you can be sure that NO APPLICATION is transferring files, and Windows continues to keep write through as default for external media (XP does, don't have Vista) then yes. But of course, the "no application" part is hard for you to know.

(Note that I still suggest using safely remove, because it's good practice and will allow MS to one day allow write caching for removable media, which is a good thing to do)

I've noticed that Windows (never had this issue with *nix) systems often steadfastly refuse to unmount removable media. Usually I unmount the drive, but when that happens I remove the drive without unmounting. I think some application blocks unmounting, probably explorer. I'll have to see if crashing explorer.exe first lets me unmount next time.