system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 what happens when I click on "Safely Eject Hardware" in the Windows Tray?

Here's what normally happens:

* I have one (1) USB stick in the computer
* I click the "safely Eject Hardware" thing
* Up comes a window asking me what I want to Eject which lists one thing: "USB Mass Storage Device"
* I have to click on that
* Up comes a window with *three* things in it: 
    * one of them is "USB Mass Storage Device" from the previous window
    * one of them is "Generic Volume"
    * one of them is the name of my device
* It doesn't matter which one I click on. 

Then it's ejected.

I mean, seriously?

**NB**: my experience is mostly with XP. Maybe it's better in 7?
gpt
If you're asking what happens when you click on the icon, it is just giving you a list of removable storage devices that you can disconnect.  The repetition is to make it easier to identify which device you want to disconnect.  If you want to disconnect fappy's device, you can do it by type *or* name.

If you're asking why you need to disconnect it, that's because the data essentially exists in two places.  And all changes are not made until you eject the device.  Imagine you have two buckets, bucket A and bucket B.  In bucket A you have some water.  You want to pour the water into the bucket B, but instead of waiting to make sure you're finished pouring all of the water from A to B, someone randomly snatches bucket B away.  Now, all the water may have been poured into bucket B, and it probably has been because that bit of water pours fast, but then again there may be a bit of a mess to clean up.  And water on the floor is very corrupt water.