What about USB Drives?

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Loungers

OK, I know that USB ports power the devices that attach to them, but when you have one of these “thumb drives”; could you simply yank it out of the port without having to shut down the computer when the “Safely Remove Hardware” procedure fails?

I know that sometime you have open files saved on these USB drives, but say you are ready to shut down the computer, i.e. all is secured, no application are running, no files are open, because the “Safely Remove Hardware” procedure failed, or due to restrictions set by the Administrator, can you just simply unplug the drive?

Thanks for enlightening me

Wassim

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Personally I always wait until the red light on the USB flash drive goes out, before removing it. I never had the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray for this device (I probably never set it up). No problems to date.

I’m a bit more careful with powering off my 300 GB external hard drive (actually on a firewire port, but same principle applies), where I will click on the icon and go through the steps before powering it off.

John

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i yank out my iPod shuffle before work everyday… as long as you aren’t transferring files i don’t think it matters. even if you have a file open from the USB drive, i don’t think anything will happen to the drive itself because wahtever was opened is kept in your memory.

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I’ve only had a problem once, where I pulled the drive out, before seeing the ‘okay’ message. It had erased the contents of the drive, or at least made it more difficult for me to find them on that drive.

But of course, I had a backup of the information that was missing.

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The only problem I’ve ever encountered while “yanking” out the drive was that sometimes the file I’d “transferred” (read as “didn’t) didn’t make it (transfer dialog box was gone, but something hadn’t finished)…

Never had a drive erased from it, etc…

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It makes no sense to not follow the procedure for safely removing a USB drive.

If you are unsure of whether the safely remove drive procedure has worked correctly, you can always shut down the computer and disconnect the drive with the power off.

To do otherwise is just asking for trouble

Those folkes whi state that they ignore such procedures are just asking for trouble.

The worst I’ve enounteredf is that, unbeknonst to me, a safely refmove procedure did not complete properly.
In retrospect, I now know why the procedure did not complete correctly and I may have been able to fix the problem, but I found out too late.
The drive was used only for a Retrospect backup. When I next tried to use Retrospect with the drive, it would not work, so I had to reformat th edrive and redo an entire systtem backup.

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> refmove procedure did not complete properly

Do NOT remove a USB drive until all procedures have fully completed !!

Alan

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in the circumstance to which i was referri9ng, it was not possible to determine whether the proedure had completed,

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[indent]

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a safely refmove procedure did not complete properly

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[/indent] You were able to determine that it didn’t complete, yet you say that [indent]

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it was not possible to determine whether the proedure had completed

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[/indent] ???????

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Yes!

Too complex to explain details here.

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I think you may have a faulty keyboard there, Howard. Or is it a USB keyboard that someone yanked out?

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Howard

It makes no sense to not follow the procedure for safely removing a USB drive.[/i]

You are absolutely right, but what if you go to some library or college where they have restricted these kinds of hardware attachments.

The idea came about when I was at a public library and I inserted the USB Flash Drive in the front panel USB port, and saved my stuff to it without any trouble.

When I came to leave, I clicked the green Systray icon to remove the USB drive, and I got a system error that said I lacked privilege… or something to that effect.

I turned off the PC, and removed the USB drive and then powered back the PC, as you suggested but was the shutting down and rebooting an over kill? Could I have done something else, less drastic and less time consuming?

Those folkes whi state that they ignore such procedures are just asking for trouble.[/i]

OK, I understand the issue of saving files, and stuff like that. If we do this shutting down and rebooting, then this is certainly not an issue, so where is the trouble coming from. Usually I save stuff on my USB that I just discovered, and I want to keep. I may not be able to get to the same URL when I get home or office, and sometimes I copy the URL and send it in an e-mail back to me, but with a 2-Gigabytes USB drive, why not do it right there and then, so the last thing I need is not have that download be of use.

In retrospect, I now know why the procedure did not complete correctly and I may have been able to fix the problem [/i]

Could you tell us what was the problem?

Thanks for any ideas

Cordially

Wassim

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What I forgot to mention about USB flash drives, to enable them to be removed reliably from the USB port, is that you need to set “Optimise for Quick Removal”, as follows:

• Connect the USB flash drive
• Go into My Computer and click on the drive
• Select Properties, then Hardware
• Select the USB drive in the list and click on Properties
• Click on the Policies tab and select “Optimise for Quick Removal”
• Click OK, and from now on all data will be written to the flash drive immediately (and not cached)[/list]Now all you need to remember is to wait until the LED on the drive goes out each time before removing it!

  John

  PS There a review of 33 types available in the UK (allegedly — I’ve never heard of most of them, and I have two types they haven’t reviewed!) in PC Pro magazine. Beware that the site may want you to log on after you’ve viewed a couple of pages…

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This is a hard-to-find setting! In Windows XP Pro SP2 in the USA, “Optimize for Quick Removal” appears to be the default for this type of device.

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Hi John:
After reading your post, I took a look at the Hardware properties for my flash drive, as well as my two external hard drives. The option to “optimize for quick removal” is greyed out on all drives. In fact, the “Optimize for performance” button is greyed out (but there is a radio check on the button anyhow). The only thing that isn’t greyed out is the option “Enable write caching on the disk”. Is there a setting somewhere that affects this?

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Hi Phil

I dont know if you got anywhere with this, I had the same situation and found I had to log in as administrator to access those removable drive policy settings. Hope that helps.

Dave

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Thanks, Dave. I’m a little embarassed. Once I right clicked my external drive & chose Properties/Hardware tab, I didn’t check to see what was in the dropdown. I just assumed I was looking at the properties for the external drive. I wasn’t. I was looking at the properties for my primary hard drive. Good thing I couldn’t optimize it for quick removal.

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John –

Not to nit pick, but which OS is this for? Win2K does not have anything that I can see as ‘Policies’.

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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Ed:
Windows XP is the only operating system which has the Safely Remove Hardware function, as far as I am aware. So the original poster’s question was (implicitly) an XP one! It should have been made more explicit, though, I agree…

Phil:
All the XP boxes I’ve looked at allow you to change the options, and are not greyed out, so I am at a bit of a loss how to explain why your situation differs.

John

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Hi John,

The idea of waiting till the drive’s light goes out is problematic – mine flashes the whole time to indicate that it’s getting power. Flashes much faster when read/write activity is going on, though.

Also, it’s worth noting that data loss can affect both the host PC and the drive, depending on whether the drive is being read from or written to (especially if via a cache) if it’s incorrectly disconnected. On my Win 2K system, though, read caching – at least – appears disabled and impossible to enable.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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The light on my Nexus drive stays on all the time, flashes when it is being accessed…

Chris

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See post 518,964 for why I couldn’t “optimize”. Now I have another question. My two external drives are “optimized for performance” & so I always see the “Safely remove hardware” message & I always get the “cannot remove…right now…” message. Are there any disadvantages to using “optimize for quick removal” rather than “optimize for performance”? I would have thought the latter would be a better alternative.

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Phil,

The obvious disadvantage is that your disk accesses will be slower.

If you optimise for performance then Windows tells an application that disk I/O is complete as soon as the data is in cache, this allows the application to continue (possibly even to start another I/O) whilst the data actually gets transferred in the background. For some applications this can create a huge performance increase.

StuartR

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