My external is scaring the shit out of me!

[ShinRa]

I have a 120gb Wester Digital external hd. Here's the catch: it has no power button! every time i want to shut it off or turn it on, i haveta pull the plug! Is that safe?! And on top of that, windows NEVER lets me "safely remove it." its always saying the drives in use and to try later. wtf?:rolling:

 

[Ren.182]

It's not a good idea to just pull the plug. The read/write head falls onto the Hard disc and can scratch it, this means there a chance it can damage the data you were reading/writing at the time and can even damage a sector on the disc. Meaning you wont be able to use that part of the disc and you'll lose some space.

I think the best thing to do is if you want to remove it, just shut the computer down and then remove it.

 

[ShinRa]

so if i shut the comp down first, then pull the plug, the disk head thing wont fall and scratch the whatever?

 

[Ren.182]

If you shut down the machine, Windows should move the disc head to the stop position ready to be switched off.

I've never used an external drive before, but i'd say shutting down would be the safest way.

 

[nofx]

Have you tried reading the manual or calling support. This sounds really bogus.

 

[Element Alpha]

by the way, an on/off switch would be just as bad as pulling the plug. What you could do is check the power/suspend settings, set HDD off after 1 minute, wait for that minute to go by so it turns off your hard disks, and then pull the plug. It's a sort of workaround, but it's not great. You should check if anything at all really is using your hdd. Maybe try to turn off antivirus.

Remember that you should never turn it off just like that: it dammages your hard disk very badly, and you may lose some data as well (related to diskcaching: sometimes your hdd doesn't write the data right away, it keeps it stored in the disk cache instead)

 

[SFPL1]

hmmm, i understand ur consearn about your Hard Drive "HD".
Firstly i would really consider turning ur pc off to remove your HD.
but this can be really annoying.
For me this is not a problem, as i us a MP3 player as a portable HD!
Simply plug into the usb2 device, and it powers up but when finished
i unplug it.
But it is sill on! So i then simply press the off switch.
Genisus!

 

[J_Tweedy]

I sometimes have that problem with the 'drive in use' with my usb stick- and found out that i had my word processor still running after i closed whatever i had opened of the disk. Make sure there aren't any programs running in the background (or in the toolbar) that are possibly communicating with the hd.

With these programs running windows will never let you safely remove it.

 

[ktimekiller]

ctrl alt delete, then shutdown nessary programs, and windows will execute a normal shutdown, forgot what program though.