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magical usb hard drive reconnects itself!

post #1 of 13
8/5/07 at 6:27pm
Thread Starter 
weird issue, everytime i click on 'safely remove hardware' then clicking on STOP on the USB hard drive i have, windows xp would disconnect the drive for about 3 seconds (disappear from my computer) and immediately it would automatically reconnect and make the new hardware detected sound and the usb hard drive would reconnect again (showing up on my computer again)!

so weird... it didnt used to do that, please help, thanks!
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post #2 of 13
8/5/07 at 7:12pm
physically disconnect it?
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post #3 of 13
8/5/07 at 7:21pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by kamiraa View Post
physically disconnect it?

its not safe to physically disconnect a usb hard drive or turn it off while windows is still running, you risk corruption of your data on the drive. you are supose to click on safely remove hardware then stopping the usb hard drive first before disconnecting it or turning it off
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post #4 of 13
8/5/07 at 7:59pm
is this an external device, such as an external Harddrive?
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post #5 of 13
8/5/07 at 8:47pm
Thread Starter 
yes, external USB hard drive.
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post #6 of 13
8/5/07 at 8:54pm
western digital by any chance?
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post #7 of 13
8/5/07 at 9:06pm
Can't you "Optimize it for Quick Removal" and not worry about corrupt data? I do that for my external drives/memory devices and haven't had a problem just pulling them out. If there is a big read/write operation going on, I wouldn't recommend pulling it out, but if you wait for the data transfer LED to go off, you should be fine.

Instead of caching data, everything is written to the disk.
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post #8 of 13
8/5/07 at 11:41pm
meh...as said above, just wait for the "drive active" light to stop then unplug it...
In the last 15 years since I started using computers, I have never used the "safely remove hardware" with external drives and USB sticks, and NEVER had one problem...
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post #9 of 13
8/5/07 at 11:55pm
I've never had any problems except under linux with fat. And it still wasnt corruption, just didnt retain write operations. Dont know too much about what you can do under windows though.
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post #10 of 13
8/6/07 at 3:06am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryotaro View Post
Can't you "Optimize it for Quick Removal" and not worry about corrupt data? I do that for my external drives/memory devices and haven't had a problem just pulling them out. If there is a big read/write operation going on, I wouldn't recommend pulling it out, but if you wait for the data transfer LED to go off, you should be fine.

Instead of caching data, everything is written to the disk.

how do i optimize it for quick removal? thanks.
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post #11 of 13
8/6/07 at 3:09am
Go to Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager then find your External Hard Drive, right click on it and go to Properties. Click on the Policies tab up the top and you should see whether "Write Caching" is enabled (optimize for performance) or disabled (optimize for quick removal).
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post #12 of 13
8/6/07 at 3:12am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by the_scotsman View Post
meh...as said above, just wait for the "drive active" light to stop then unplug it...
In the last 15 years since I started using computers, I have never used the "safely remove hardware" with external drives and USB sticks, and NEVER had one problem...

yea well my data are too precious to take any chances, granted the chances of corruption are very slim if you unplug while led activity light is inactive.... and usb sticks are fine for just unplugging anytime, but not 500gb usb hard drives... they made that safely remove hardware feature for a purpose. while obviously no physical damage will come to the drive from unplugging it directly, i lost a hard drive of data AND a sd card to corruption of files last year (alot of files stored on the drive became unreadable or uncopyable), ever since then, i started using safely remove, no problem since, this is the only 100% guarantee way to know your antivirus or windows or whatever program in the background isnt accessing the drive at the moment, especially if you didnt turn off recycle bin for external drives or windows indexing (which i did turn off)
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post #13 of 13
8/6/07 at 3:16am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by the_scotsman View Post
Go to Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager then find your External Hard Drive, right click on it and go to Properties. Click on the Policies tab up the top and you should see whether "Write Caching" is enabled (optimize for performance) or disabled (optimize for quick removal).

hey thanks for the tip, how much performance decrease (file copying) should i expect to see by optimizing it for quick removal?
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