Windows 7 - Problem ejecting USB External Hard Drive

Whenever I try to eject my 160GB Western Digital USB External HD.

I get the following message :

see screenshot


Even after restarting my computer and trying to eject the USB drive again I still get the message. I'm reluctant to just pull the chord out because I don't want to risk losing any data.

How do I go about ejecting it safely ?

I could probably just change the setting to "optimize for quick removal" however I like performance and want all the performance I can get in order to make my drive as fast as possible.

Finally for the record I use my drive for data storage and backup.


Thanks

Any help as usual would be greatly appreciated !

Could it be your anti-virus is monitoring the drive in real-time for infections?

Try disabling that, and any other file indexers or backup programs you might have.

I would set it to the default of "Quick removal".

I don't think there will be a noticable difference in speed, and more importantly, it will prevent data loss in case it gets accidentally disconnected.

I have a Seagate 500 GB I leave on all the time. I have it set for performance. Things I did to eliminate unnecessary disk activity(and therefore the system trying to hold onto it) are, I have Windows indexing disabled... if you want to use it you may want to disable indexing from that drive.. what I used instead is Everything Search. It hooks into the NTFS journaling to get updated without indexing. Also I found locate32 search updating was causing the drive to be indexed.. causing me to switch to Everything Search.

To make sure I flush buffers to disk I use sync.exe that you can get from SysInternals. The Seagate has an activity LED. If that is still and I've flushed the buffers I don't worry about losing data. Basically the performance options just enables write caching. If you have battery backup and make sure to flush buffers or wait awhile before disconnecting you should be ok.

This doesn't take into account drives spinning up and down or any green energy saver stuff. I have the drive set to spin up and stay up all the time it's connected. If you have some power saver options then you'd have to experiment. But I've been running this way for over a year and I don't notice anything missing.

Interesting, just curious what do you use your hard drive for ?