shakey said:
Thank you again Ken. The No is what I hoped to hear.
As for the "turn off to disconnect" part I cannot find that site now, had
been to too many, but did find sites that basically said click disconnect
on toolbar then remove power, same as you. Not surprised as I found much
conflicting information out there. That's why I appreciate the
knowledgeable help here.
SG
shakey:
I think that the sites you came across were probably referring to the Safely
Remove Hardware icon that normally appears in the lower right corner (the
"Notification area") of one's Taskbar when one or more USB external devices
are connected in the system (such as your USB external HDDs). Clicking on
that icon will trigger the "Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device" process
which disconnects the device from the system. (It does *not* power off the
device such as your USBEHDs which use their own power supply).
Generally speaking we rarely use the SRH process. Rather In the "Disk
drives" section of Device Manager, you can right-click on the USB device in
question and select Properties. On the Properties sheet that opens, click on
the Policies tab. You'll see two options, one of which is "Optimize for
quick removal". Select that option if it's not already selected (it's
usually the default). Click OK.
Note the "Optimize for quick removal" option indicates "... you can
disconnect this device without using the Safe Removal icon".
If, on the other hand, the instructions that came with the device
*specifically* instructs the user to use the Safely Remove icon to stop the
device before ejecting or unplugging it (notwithstanding the "Optimize for
quick removal" option), then follow those instructions.
I would add that I've disconnected various USB devices hundreds of times
without using the Safely Remove Hardware icon (after ensuring that the
option mentioned above had been selected) and have never encountered a
single problem involving loss or corruption of data or any other problem
affecting the device or the OS. This situation is more relevant to the
myriad flash drive devices in use today rather than an externally-powered
USB HDD since powering-off the latter device (in effect) removes it from the
system; again, the SRH process does *not* power-off a device that contains
its own power supply such as a USBEHD.
And as Ken Blake points out it's always wise to power off the USBEHD when
you're finished with it. Many users forget to power-off the device after
they shutdown the PC so that power is unnecessarily running to the USB HDD
even after the computer is not being used.
Anna
