advantages and disadvantages of manually un/mounting drives.

Question

What are the advantages or disadvantages of manually un/mounting internal drives?

I've never really bothered un-mounting internal HDDs after mounting them the first time around but would like to know if there are any advantages/disadvantages of doing so - for the home *nix user.

Answer 1

You probably won't be able to manually un-mount devices that contain root and/or home filesystems: too many processes will have one or the other as their current working directory. So that can't be your situation.

Disadvantages:

1. Requires root to mount or unmount.
2. Easy to forget to do, causing extra puzzlement.

Advantages:

1. A disk un-mounted when a power failure occurs would be less likely to have its filesystem(s) messed up. The filesystem(s) are quiescent.
2. Easier to do fsck-style filesystem cleanup - don't have to do it during boot.