Think of your usb hard drive as your real hard drive. Now imagine just taking it out in the middle of game. Sounds careless and unsafe right? However if you needed to do that immediately unplug your xbox and replug it in the next minute or so. My best suggestion; don't take your usb hard drive out while your xbox is on. Technically the red ring of death means an error has occurred or the game you were playing was corrupted, or data has stopped flowing. A hard drive stores data!