Seagate External Expansion HDD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Peter Green
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Peter Green

Just bought one of these. It comes with its own power supply and has
USB 2.0 connection. Works great. Does anyone know if I have to
safe-remove and disconnect it from the PC each time I shut down ? Can't
seem to find any info on the Seagate site about this.

Thanks in advance.
 
Peter said:
Just bought one of these. It comes with its own power supply and has
USB 2.0 connection. Works great. Does anyone know if I have to
safe-remove and disconnect it from the PC each time I shut down ? Can't
seem to find any info on the Seagate site about this.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Could you mention the exact part number or product name ?

It might be easier to find info with a name to use.

Paul
 
Peter said:
Sorry. It is a "Seagate Expansion External Drive". Model
ST305004EXD101-RK
Click to expand...

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_ext_desktop.pdf

The documentation claims it has "Built-in power management", so
that makes it more likely to spin down any time you haven't
accessed it in a while. It could spin down on you, even while
the OS is still running.

If you left your computer running all the time, there might be
good reason to "Safely Remove" then remove power from the device.
The advantage there, would be preventing nuisance spinups of
the device. Sometimes, if the OS probes the device at regular
intervals, you can get a lot of spinup/spindown cycles, which
isn't good for the loading ramp and head retraction. A drive is
rated for a minimum of 50,000 of those cycles, but if an
aggressive timer is involved, you can burn up a lot of cycles
in a day.

But in terms of a power down cycle of the computer, the OS should
flush any caches before closing down. The device should then be
as ready as possible. Then, any activity timer in the drive itself, should
trigger spindown soon after.

If you had a product which didn't have an activity timer, and
continued to spin even when the OS wasn't running, then I'd
follow your suggestion, of doing something to prevent that.
You could use "Safely Remove", followed by power off, before
the OS was shut down. Or just power the device off, after the OS
was shut down.

Paul
 
The reason you can't find any info regarding that is that like all USB
devices disconnection is is not necessary.
 
Peter said:
Just bought one of these. It comes with its own power supply and has
USB 2.0 connection. Works great. Does anyone know if I have to
safe-remove and disconnect it from the PC each time I shut down ? Can't
seem to find any info on the Seagate site about this.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

The reason for the "safely remove" feature is that if you have enabled
write caching on a detachable writable device (IIRC, write caching is
disabled by default in Win XP for removable devices), you might lose
data if you just yank the cable out. When you click "safely remove,"
you force the cache to write to the device and empty. A normal shutdown
sequence should do the same, so you need not bother going through the
extra manual step.
 
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