As long as it gives you the message that it's okay to remove, you can remove it. If it is dangerous to remove it, it will tell you that you shouldn't.
On top of flash drives, I use an external drive that is hot swappable, but I still click the icon to remove it. Just to be safe against data loss.
Portable hard drive spins down and STOPs spinning at all in XP, and does not in W7. Hot Swap software does not stop the spinning of the hard drive after using the safe removal in XP. Plugging out the USB data cable (I do not use the power supply part of the cable) causes a nasty weezing noise of the compulsory stop of the plate. I can not believe it's safe and I turn the system off to unplug the portable drive. Is it only with W7? I have WD TV HD Media Player and ejecting command for the portable usb hard drive causes stop of the spinning. I still have not tested the Hot Swap program in W7.
I believe Brink has already covered the questions in this thread, but I will add my personal observations anyway.
I have a USB flash drive with a red light on it. The light is on when there is some write/read activity going on, otherwise the light is off. Naturally I always remove the drive when the light is off. Usually I click the "safely remove" button, wait a sec for an OK, then remove it. Sometimes I forget to do so. Nothing bad has ever happened, with one exception - but that was on a Mac.
I observe this behavior on XP, 7, and Vista. The only time I actually had a problem was when I used this drive on a Mac and forgot about safely remove button. The whole drive became corrupt and I had to use special software to retrieve what data I could from it.
I also have an external hard drive - Seagate FreeAgent or something. This drive has a cool looking ambient light thing, which goes on as soon as the drive is connected to a PC (it uses a separate power supply as well). It also has an on/off touch button. If the drive is powered up - i.e. plugged in - while the PC is operational, or the PC is booted up, while the drive is plugged in, then the light goes on. If I power the PC down, the light goes off. In these situations the on/off button is not used. Now, if I want to stop the drive without shutting down the PC, I click the "safely remove" button, wait for an OK (at this point the light remains on!), then press the on/off button. At this point the light goes off and at the same time the drive stops spinning, after that it's safe to unplug it (I always unplug devices that are not in use).
I have never turned it off without using the safely remove procedure. The drive is connected to the Windows 7 machine, I have never used it in XP. I do not use any special software. Oh, and I have never unplugged the USB cable, I just turn it off and unplug from the electric grid.
Hope that helps.
by default, windows 7 has devices in "safely remove" mode anyway whenever their not actually in use, ie if you just pull it, unless your actually transferring files then its usually safe to do so without safely removing it, unless youv changed the option of course,
after doing 'safely remove hardware' enter 'sleep' mode (start > shutdown menu > sleep ) and usb hdd will spin down. it is a lot faster method than shutting down pc.
I have an external (500GB Seagate Expansion) usb hard drive that is not USB powered that I use soley for backups. Although the disk is permanently connected to a USB port I generally only spin the disk up when I want to do backups. I use the safe eject to make sure that there is no data transfer in progress then pull the (power) plug on the disk. The disk doesn't have a power switch.
I assume "head crashes" are a thing of the distant past.
I know the remove device is to avoid data corruption if the write behind cache is enabled, but what about if the disk keep spinning? i have a western digital passport elite the portable drive keep spinning, is not damaging the disc when moving around after i take it from example, the USB dock that comes with some passport elite drives?, i mean, it will power off only after taking it out.
I'm using Win 7 at home & Win XP at work. I safely remove device (USB pen drive) on Win XP and the display 'ok to remove...' comes up and the light goes off. But on Win 7 the 'ok to remove...' displays but the light stays on. This has also concerned me. However the pen drive is still working so I just presumed it's one of those quirky things of new OS's until they sort it out.
ok thanks.. in the end as long as the data & disk are safe, then all is good...
...but this thing called curiosityit'll be interesting to know the reasoning for this under Win 7
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