Auto un-mount drives?

This may be a bit of a newb question, but I find it a bit annoying that I need to eject my compact flash cards before I remove them. Is there a way to set this up so OSX doesn't care? Obviously that would put me in danger if there were still reads/writes happening on the card but that's hardly ever the case.

Currently I've got an app I use to import images that will unmount when it's done importing but I don't always use CF just for images.

Is cmd+E that hard,...?

is it really that difficult to do all by yourself?

By the responses I suppose the answer is "no."

Bear in mind that this is a BSD unix base. The concept of mounting and unmounting file systems is integral to how it views them. Every OS has its peculiarities. This is one that is particular to the *nix family of OS', and that includes Mac OS X.

That said, unmounting/ejecting a drive is a safety feature. What you are doing is telling the OS that you are about to disconnect the drive. What it does with this info is flush any cached write-behind data that it is holding onto the drive, ensuring that it is fully up to date as you remove it. You WANT this to happen!

As a side note, if you are a *nix expert, you could mount the device with the "sync" option. This disables write-behind caching and causes everything to write directly to the device as you attempt the write, rather than caching it for efficiency. Technically you can then safely remove the device at will, BUT you will pay in terms of speed. It is slow, slow, slow.

BTW, Windows has similar, but disguised concepts in the "Safely Remove Hardware" thingy (thats a technical term!) that shows up in the system tray when you plug in a removable device. So, this is not just a Mac OS X item.