Safely removing the external devices is important in two aspects: one – to prevent the data loss; two – to maintain the good health of your storage device. Same thing applies to the Android devices also, including your Android SmartPhone or Tablet.

Today, many Android devices come with a USB port to connect external storage or communication devices like USB drive, internet dongle etc. We generally remove the external devices safely on computers using the device options (eg. right click USB icon in Windows tray, and click Safely remove). In this short tutorial, we’ll see how to safely remove USB storage from your Android device in order to avoid the data loss or any kind of hardware damage.

In order to safely remove a USB storage device from your Android gadget, you don’t need to install any additional apps on your Android, you can make use of the Settings of your Android device to do that.

Lets get into that. Just move to it’s Settings section as shown in the below screenshot (I’ve used Android 4.0.4 Ice cream Sandwich in the screenshots).

Android Settings

Scroll down to the Storage option there, click it. Now, look for the USB Storage section, and click the Unmount Storage option below it.

Unmount storage in Android

You will be prompted to confirm the unmounting of the storage device. Click OK to unmount.

Unmount storage alert in Android

That’s it! You’ve successfully safely removed or unmounted the external USB storage device from your Android. You will also be able to see a notification about that in the notification tray.

'Storage safe to remove' message in Android