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From: Brian V on 18 Apr 2010 12:31
Hi. I have an external hard-drive question. I use USB 3.5" external
hard-drives. Is it ok to just unplug them from USB or should I use theremove
hardware icon before unplugging?

Can the drive be damaged?

Does this apply to flash cards or usb memory sticks?

Thank you.
From: Shenan Stanley on 18 Apr 2010 13:49
Brian V wrote:
> Hi. I have an external hard-drive question. I use USB 3.5" external
> hard-drives. Is it ok to just unplug them from USB or should I use
> theremove hardware icon before unplugging?
>
> Can the drive be damaged?
>
> Does this apply to flash cards or usb memory sticks?

The 'remove hardware' is more for devices like USB connected hard drives -
in case there is any cached data that needs to be written to them before you
disconnect.

This is unlikely to be the case with a 3.5" floppy diskette/diskette drive.

In general - it's probably wiser to do the remove hardware thing - but for
most things (your case in particular surrounding really just the hardware,
not anything likely to be waiting to write to a floppy diskette) just
removing the device without doing anything else would work fine.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html


From: Brian V on 18 Apr 2010 14:37
Ok It's an external hard-drive. I just re-formatted them. There's nothing on
them.

It's not for a floppy drive. I thought 3.5" HDD is the right term? (I forgot
HDD).

I have had that remove hardware icon sitting there for a while now. I just
chose remove and it finally went away. In there is said USB Mass Storage. So
from now on I will remove those before I unplug them.

Jsut curiour though: what info gets written? If I were just dragging and
dropping music, video or certain files in programs (extentions with a project
or preferences saved, etc), what gets written? In this case is it important
to have that information written? Isn't cached data kind of like a log or
temporay memory?
From: Twayne on 18 Apr 2010 17:22
In news:A2408E0A-6086-40D2-A76D-3C85F4756316(a)microsoft.com,
Brian V <BrianV(a)discussions.microsoft.com> typed:
> Ok It's an external hard-drive. I just re-formatted them.
> There's nothing on them.
>
> It's not for a floppy drive. I thought 3.5" HDD is the
> right term? (I forgot HDD).
>
> I have had that remove hardware icon sitting there for a
> while now. I just chose remove and it finally went away. In
> there is said USB Mass Storage. So from now on I will
> remove those before I unplug them.
>
> Jsut curiour though: what info gets written? If I were just
> dragging and dropping music, video or certain files in
> programs (extentions with a project or preferences saved,
> etc), what gets written? In this case is it important to
> have that information written? Isn't cached data kind of
> like a log or temporay memory?

Apparently when he saw 3/5" he opted to believe it was a
floppy drive, not a hard drive. Your information was presented
properly.

Yes, you should use the remove hardware icon. The reason is,
that a lot of things sit in RAM in buffers and don't get
written to the hard drive when you think they do. You might
"Save" a file and think it's over. But, the Save results could
possible be sittin gin a buffer, not yet written to the drive.
So if you just turn off the drive, it's going to crash that
file and it'll probably never be able to be opened again. OR,
nothing might go wrong. It all depends on what's going on
inside the computer.

There is a setting, I forget where at the moment, that lets
you tell a hard drive to never buffer anything, always write
it to disk immediately. If you set that, then you'll no longer
see your drive in the remove hardware window, and you can just
turn it off. You do need the gumption to be sure you've saved
all files that might be in edit ofr that drive of course, but
.... well that's common sense<g>.
Depending on your setup, you may or may not notice that the
never-buffer setting slows things down a tad because instead
of shoving the data into a buffer and jumping right to the
next task it needs to do, the machine must finish that write
before it can go on to the next task.

Hope that makes some sort of sense<G>

Twayne`


From: LD55ZRA on 18 Apr 2010 18:18
Twayne wrote:

>
>There is a setting, I forget where at the moment, that lets
>you tell a hard drive to never buffer anything, always write
>it to disk immediately. If you set that, then you'll no longer
>see your drive in the remove hardware window, and you can just
>turn it off. You do need the gumption to be sure you've saved
>all files that might be in edit ofr that drive of course, but
>... well that's common sense<g>.
>
>
>
>
Perhaps this is what you were thinking about:

1) Plug in your flash drive or external HD in the available USB port

2) Go to the Start menu and double-click My Computer. Right-click on
your flash drive or HD and go to properties.

3) In the properties dialog box click on the Hardware tab and as soon as
it becomes populated, click to select your flash drive or HD.

4) Click on the properties button. The general tab will appear by
default in the pop up dialog box. Now click on the policies tab and
ensure that the radio button beside the option "Optimize for Quick
Removal" is checked. The default is "optimise for performance".

5) Click ok twice to close both dialog boxes and you are done. Now you
should be able to un-plug your flash drive without fear of loosing any data.

hth

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