Safety Remove a HDD (SATA)

garryggreen said:

You (not I) said that you have "pull the cable". I'm not disputing that you've pulled the cable. I'm sure you have. And if you don't give a damned about your data, good for you. Pulling a cable while data is being transferred, unless you have a magical disk that can continue to transfer wirelessly, will cause data corruption. So you've been lucky - congrats. I stand by what I and MS say - unless you tell the OS that it should flush and cease transferring data to the disk, data transfer can be occurring and if you pull the plug at that time.............

Suppose you say "hey I haven't copied any data to that disk for at least 5 minutes so it should be safe". Well there are several background tasks that MAY be accessing your disk. May be writing to the disk. So you check the disk activity light - it is not on. You reach out and start to (your words) "pull the cable". Your hand touches the cable and you start to pull. But you haven't told the OS not to use the disk. As you start pulling, the OS starts writing. Tada - data corruption. The POLICIES MINIMIZES the risk for those that like gambling with their data. All I said was that you like to gamble with your data and others might not realize this and start losing data.

You also said (not me) that setting the Policy for Quick Removal means the Safely Remove is irrelevant. So you tell the OS not to write cache. So how do you know when the OS is finished writing to the disk? How do you know that some background task (see above) won't start writing to the disk at the same time that you reach out to unplug the disk? You don't, nor does the OS. To safely remove a SATA disk, the OS MUST be told, otherwise you risk corruption. You may get lucky sometimes, but eventually you will get caught. Its like taking backups. No one likes to until they need to restore.

YOU MUST TELL THE OS USING SOME METHOD TO STOP WRITING TO THE DISK BEFORE REMOVING IT. POLICY Quick Removal minimizes the risk - it does not eliminate it. Take the extra 3 seconds to SAFELY REMOVE the disk.

Pitch001 - read what I wrote. We are talking about DATA CORRUPTION. Do you think Windows knows if you have internal or external power? Whether the adapter is blue or red? Duh!!! The OS does not know if the disk is internal or external. Regarding data loss, there is NO DIFFERENCE between internal and external. There is no camera inside your PC to tell the OS. There is no signal that a disk sends saying it is internal or external. The cable WAS exactly the same and often still is - some external sata disk's use a newer more robust external sata cable, but again, the PC doesn't have a camera to report this, so the OS doesn't know. Not getting into a flaming war - this thread was about data corruption, data loss and safely removing your disk. SATA disks were from day 1 designed to safely allow unplugging them (hot swap) without removing the power, without causing electrical sparks and physical destruction of the disk and maybe the mainboard due to plug and electrical specs. So you won't destroy your disk/mainboard by unplugging while there is power. This has NOTHING to do with this thread, so please try to stay on topic. This is about after NOT destroying your disk by sparks, whether the data on the disk is safe.

Too many people say either "just pull it" or "wait 1 minute after using the disk then just pull it" or "change the Policy for Quick Removal and then just pull it". This is not safe and it says so in the MS Policy settings.

Strollin - maybe I was too harsh, but your implication was that you can safely just yank the cable. You can't. You can yank it.................but.

I think the controller have to recognized which interface the disk use.
Example I have a kind of this
Amazon.com : SATA/PATA/IDE Drive to USB 2.0 Adapter Converter Cable for 2.5 / 3.5 Inch Hard Drive / 5 inch Optical Drive with External AC Power Adapter : Computer Cables & Interconnects : Computers & Accessories

The drive is internal and yes the os install a usb bridge to recognize the hdd.

Its very dangerous to unplug the stuff while computer is running the material is not dedicated for and if you dont think im right

When we were in class the instructor of A+ said sata was hotplug and could disconnect while running.

The teacher didnt trust him they try and after that the hdd was defect and the board too.

That it !

I know this is kinda an old thread, but I figured I'd chip in some useful info for the Googlers that come through here...

Everyone is correct in that you shouldn't just "pull the cable" during disk idle time.
The premise is that you tell the os "Okay, I'm needing to remove the drive; finish all your activity."
For SATA drives that don't show up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" list, this is how you hotswap a drive without powering off the computer...

(Quick step-by-step here.)

First, open Disk Management (Run > diskmgmt.msc).


Then, identify which drive it is that you want to remove.


Right-click the drive you wish to remove (the drive itself, not any of its partitions), and click "Offline" to cease all activity.


When the drive is marked as "offline," it is safe to remove.


Once you pull the cables (or the drive from its bay), it will vanish from the list.
If it stays in the list, just refresh the view to see the updated list.


As for plugging in any SATA drives while powered on, I do recommend you plug the power cable in first, and allow the drive to fully spin up. This way, once you connect the data cable, the drive is ready for it, and Windows will quickly recognize it.

Hope this helps.
Personally tested on Vista/7/8/8.1/and 10.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Most, if not all, MOBOs now have a Hot Swap setting in the BIOS or UEFI, making all that folderol completely unnecessary.

Ooh, yeah. Forgot about that. Think it requires AHCI though, right?
Also, I think AHCI has to be enabled prior to Windows being installed, as changing it later will prevent Windows from booting?
That, and not all BIOSes have the AHCI option... only AMD/Intel chipsets, amirite?

All in all, I prefer just to stick to Disk Management.