I connect two external USB hard drives and (sometimes) several thumb drives through a 7 port USB hub. Short of a system shut down, does anyone know of a way to eject all devices simultaneously? I frequently need to move my notebook to other locations and back.
Try USB Disk Eject. It'll not remove all usb devices simultaneously, but it'll make the job easier.
Ejecting the hub will forcefully eject the connected drives, maybe not what you want if you have open files on them.
What the OP can do is to optimize the drives for "Quick Removal". Right click on the drive and select Properties, Go to Policies tab. Select the radio button for "Quick Removal". Now you can just yank the drive out (after making sure your data transfers are complete and files closed, no harm in being careful).
If the drives are optimized for quick removal, ejecting the usb hub should also work. I dont know if the hub can also be set to quick removal.
If you set the device to "Optimize for quick removal" in Device Manager > Disk Drives > Properties > Policies, then you can remove the devices without Eject or Safely Remove. With that setting you can be certain that no data lingers in memory buffers that was not yet written to the device. The downside is that the write operations to those devices may be a smidget slower.
Thanks to all for the quick suggestions. USB Quick Eject advises their intention to add a "/REMOVEALL" switch in the future. Bill2 and whs's policy edit seems the best solution for now. My devices were all configured for quick removal already. Is this a Windows default, or do I have a check mark somewhere? Can I trust that configuation will be such with each start?
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