Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media + Crucial SSD

jeeprad · 16 Jan 2011

Hi,

HP Elite 112y Desktop
AMD Phenom II 925 Quad Core
AMG 785G mobo (native 3GB/s)
Win 7 Pro

I just installed a Crucial C300 SATA 3 SSD (6GB/s), and since my mobo only supports SATA 2 (3GB/s), I also installed a SATA 3 adapter card.

Installation went fine and it runs great!
Windows recognizes the C300 as a hard drive, but also as a device;
and in the notification area it lists the C300 as a device to be removed - like a USB drive.

This looks like an accident waiting to happen!
So can someone tell me how to make it stop doing that without disabling the notification completely?

Mashed1316 · 17 Jan 2011

That's because you have the SSD running in AHCI mode which enables Hot Plug :) it is completely safe to leave it as it is..

whs · 17 Jan 2011

If you turn off "Write Caching" in Device manager > Policies tab, you get rid of it. But you pay a performance price.

GeneO · 17 Jan 2011

See this article on how to turn off hot-plug on a per SATA port basis (doesn't apply for Intel RST drivers I believe):

My internal SATA device appears in Devices and Printers and in the Safely Remove Hardware area of the system tray?

Worked for me. I am using one of my internal SATA ports as hot-swap esata to the front panel, the rest internal drives. Want to hot swap the eSATA but not the internals and didn't want to accidentally remove an internal.

jeeprad · 20 Jan 2011

Thanks to all of you for your input.

Punkster is correct in that I am indeed running in AHCI mode.
I'm just going to go with his comment that it's not hurting anything, and just leave it be.

WHS, thanks for the idea and also for pointing out the downside.

GeneO, thanks for the link.
Although that wasn't exactly my prob, it was a good read.

whs · 20 Jan 2011

I would like to get back to the performance impact if one turns off write caching. On second thought, I am not so sure any more.

What write caching allows (in my understanding) is to accumulate records in a buffer so that so that they can be written to the disk in one big swoop. That is an advantage on a spinning disk because all those records are written during the same rotation - and there is also only one seek for the arm.

I wonder though whether that brings the same advantage to the SSD where access time to any place is the same - and it is usually only 0.1ms. There would be an advantage if the records were written in larger blocks from the buffer because the SSD's write performance grows as the block size grows. But if records are still being written e.g. 4K at a time, there may not be an advantage.

I think I will start a seperate thread to discuss this.

pbcopter · 20 Jan 2011

Regarding " an accident waiting to happen", my experience with this is, Windows will not let you remove the system drive.