Some clarity about how file systems work…
When writing files to a drive and choosing to remove the drive without first unmounting it ( ie ‘safely remove drive’ ), yes, you risk corrupting or completely losing the file you were trying to write and possibly now leaving an invalid entry in the file system, be it a FAT, journal, or whatever. Note that in most file systems and in standard operations, this act does NOT risk the other files on the drive, but under certain conditions ( where segments are reallocated on the fly to avoid fragmentation ) in less common file systems, it may be possible. For FAT / FAT32 file system, the only data you stand to lose is whatever data may be present in the disc cache ( if enabled ).
Now in regards to the WD TV Live… in most cases, a FAT32 is used on the various USB drives and in standard embedded linux kernels ( which is basically what the WDTV Live is running ), there is no *cough* ‘smart’ on the fly defragmention that goes on in the background on this type of file system. So while the WD TV Live may write a cache file or what have you on the drive and abruptly removing that drive may not flush the drives physical cache ( if the kernel even enables the drive’s cache, which is may not - see unchecking the write cache option in Windows ), there should be no risk to any other files on the drive.
So if you are using a FAT32 formatted drive and seeing movie files being truncated to 0 bytes, that’s not from abruptly removing the drive, but rather something else behaving very, very badly.
