Windows 7: Unable to Safely remove

I'm having a little problem with safely removing any of my external hard drives that I connect. The USB icon will show in the taskbar and when I place my mouse over it, it says Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media. But when I click it, it won't show the external drives to eject. I have even tried to the eject option by right clicking my external drive in my computer. But the eject option is not there anymore. Can anyone help me with this? I don't know if it helps but under Policies in the Device Manager, the external hard drive is set to Quick Removal. Thanks.

If it is set to quick removal you don't need to "Safely Remove". If you set it to anything else ( to maximise speed etc) then you do need "Safely Remove" and the option will reappear.

Regards....Mike Connor

Hi WTFk welcome to SevenForums,

By default, External Devices are set for Quick Removal, as you have already found out. This means that they do not have to be "Safely Removed" as Windows knows that you could remove them at any time, and as such, only reads and writes when it has to. In essence, the only time it is NOT ok to remove it, is while a File transfer is taking place, or while you are accessing something on it.

By contrast, Internal Devices (i.e Sata HDD's) DO need to be safely removed, if you are planning to hotswap them. (Meaning the process of unplugging while the machine is still on) In truth though, this doesn't have that many practical applications.

Hope it Helps

Thanks for the quick replies. I saw in device manager that I just remove it without using the safely remove. But this just happened this week. As of last week I was able to use the safely remove option and I did not change the policies for any of the external drives. So I was just wondering what happened. Any way that I can get the Safely Remove option showing again?

Probably it was set incorrectly, and a driver update or something corrected the situation. It can be "fixed" under the policies by changing it out of Quick Removal (can't remember what the other option is called) but honestly, there really is no need to. The so called "benefits" in speed are negligible, at least on my machine.

Set it to this;



Regards....Mike Connor

The default is "Better Performance".

Regards....Mike Connor

I had already tried changing it to Better Performance and it was the same thing. I guess I can just leave it as is. Thanks

If you can not change it then something else is wrong. Are you having any other "odd" experiences with the machine?

Regards....Mike Connor

No, no other odd experiences. At least not that I'm aware of. I'm using it mainly for gaming, so I'm really not sure if there's something else that wrong