windows 7 does not turn off usb mass storage

Hello arash,

That is perfectly normal. The USB port is still supplying power to the drive, just not sending any signal.

Safely Remove Hardware - Eject Device

That is the tutorial for safely removing a device in Windows 7. Windows 7 plug and play is greatly improved over XP so there is no real need for it for flash drives and many other USB devices. Having said that there may be a few devices that are sensitive to how they are powered on and off, but for flash drives, they are pretty durable for quick plug and play. Actually they are quite durable in general as I have left two of my flash drives (one drive in two occasions) in my pants and had them go through a complete wash and dry clothing cycle and still perform perfectly afterwords.

The other half of the safely remove hardware is to power off the computer before plugging the device in. If your not powering your computer off before you plug the device in and it still works, then you should be able to unplug it without the safely remove hardware. One thing I would recommend is to give the flash drive a few seconds after data has been transferred just to make sure the transfer is complete (especially with flash drives and XP)

I guess old habits die hard....I was told I shouldn't have to worry about doing the "Safely remove" thing with this OS, but it's still ingrained in me to do it, whether it is unplugging my mp3 players, my flash drive, my camera, or my external drive.

I believe the safely remove hardware feature is related to write-caching. Basically, Windows might not have actually finished writing the data to the drive when it says it has. It may be just watching for a time when it can write the data without affecting performance.

When you eject the drive, it needs to make sure that all data "saved" to it is actually written.

You can turn off write caching if you want, and with it, the need to safely remove.

Jonathan_King said:

I believe the safely remove hardware feature is related to write-caching. Basically, Windows might not have actually finished writing the data to the drive when it says it has. It may be just watching for a time when it can write the data without affecting performance.

When you eject the drive, it needs to make sure that all data "saved" to it is actually written.

You can turn off write caching if you want, and with it, the need to safely remove.

When it says, "enable write caching for better performance", what exactly does it mean by better performance? Sorry if that's a dumb question, but I am half-awake and want to be sure I understand before I change any setting.

noob said:

I guess old habits die hard....I was told I shouldn't have to worry about doing the "Safely remove" thing with this OS, but it's still ingrained in me to do it, whether it is unplugging my mp3 players, my flash drive, my camera, or my external drive.

Yeah I do not really believe in that remove hardware procedure either. I hot swap all USB and SATA/E-SATA devices myself, but I would hate to tell someone else to do that as well and have something happen to the device. Microsoft knows that people want to put in their Flash drives/memory cards/cameras etc and be able to do what they need and take their device out and be on their way, not have them be part of the computer and leave them plugged in all the time. That is why they make improvements on plug and play all the time. I have been hot swapping all USB devices since XP without incident, so I cannot see Windows 7 being any less capable.

EDIT:

I believe the safely remove hardware feature is related to write-caching. Basically, Windows might not have actually finished writing the data to the drive when it says it has. It may be just watching for a time when it can write the data without affecting performance.

When you eject the drive, it needs to make sure that all data "saved" to it is actually written.

You can turn off write caching if you want, and with it, the need to safely remove.

Yeah, it seemed to affect XP a lot more than Windows 7. With Windows 7 and a flash drive, as soon as my flash drive transfer was completed, the drive could be removed without incident. With XP, if I did not give it a few extra seconds after transfer, I would occasionally get failed to write to device error (cache write error) and the OS would recognize the error with the next time it was plugged in and prompt for a fix. The data was never affected though.

Basically it will write the data in its own leisure.

I could be wrong. I recommend a Google search of write caching.

Write Caching

Interesting.....I have seen what is referenced in Brink's tutorial , and in Jonathan's link, the device saying to the computer that the transfer is done before it really is done, with the write caching enabled.

So after a little poking around and reading, a test was in order....and come to find out, the one device in particular, a Samsung mp3 player, will not let me select the quick removal operation, after all. Then again,I suppose if it was that big a deal to quickly disconnect it, I could switch it over to the MTP USB protocol instead of the MSC setting.

Anyways, thanks for your help.:)

There's a safely remove hardware button?

I've been lied to my whole life.