Safely Remove Hardware

Ricki · 16 Jun 2007 at 15:04

What do people do when it comes to disconneting your USB pen, external HDD, mobile, MP3 player or whatever else form your PC? And why?

When it comes to me to remove my USB pen, external HDDs or mobile I just yank it out making sure that any copying/deleting/accessing is complete before I do yank it out - I usually start the copying over (eg. music to my mobile, a backup of my coursework etc), or whatever else I am doing, and then go listen to music or surf the net and come back several minutes later to check on progress and if complete then disconnect it.

As I understand it all this "Safely Remove Hardware" does is to make sure that the device is not currently being used by a program and that no data is going back or forth between the PC and the device. In which case as long as you leave sufficient time between last accessing or transfering data then you should be fine to yank the device out. I can't imagine the sudden lack of power through the devices from disconnecting them would damage it as surely pluging it in the first place would cause more damage and therefore there should be a "Safely Attach Hardware" function?

Am I hugely mistaken and massively shortening the life of my devices by doing this (I have yet to have any fail on me and one of my external HDD has had frequent use for the past 3 years without a single hiccup)? Or is this just a way to protect the less computer savvy (I am thinking parents who can barely operate the mouse and lecturers who do everything by the book when it comes to computing)? Does the file format (NTFS / FAT32) make a difference and is one less likely to corrupt than the other?

fobose · 16 Jun 2007 at 15:36

I have just "yanked out" a USB pen before when nothing was being transfered to/from it and next time I went to use it it asked me if I wanted to format it - I had lost all my work! Luckilly it wasn't important to me tho!

Phemo · 16 Jun 2007 at 16:02

I copied something to a USB stick the other day, left it for a minute or so after the copy process was complete and then just unplugged it. When I plugged it back into another PC, the stuff I'd copied on wasn't actually there at all. Bizarre.

I always try to do the safely remove option

Though sometimes it just doesn't work and errors saying the device is in use when it clearly isn't at all.

kitfit1 · 16 Jun 2007 at 19:19

Recently i installed a usb wireless solution for my stepdaughter. After days of working on it i found that if i "Safely Remove Hardware", the next time the pc was booted it connected to the wireless router immediately. If i just shut the pc down normally, when rebooted it would take for ever to get a connection to the router. So in my case i would say that Yes it does do something. With wireless usb sticks, my guess is that windows is remembering the settings, as the stick obviously does not.

noxidjkram@hotm · 16 Jun 2007 at 21:47

kitfit1 said:
Recently i installed a usb wireless solution for my stepdaughter. After days of working on it i found that if i "Safely Remove Hardware", the next time the pc was booted it connected to the wireless router immediately. If i just shut the pc down normally, when rebooted it would take for ever to get a connection to the router. So in my case i would say that Yes it does do something. With wireless usb sticks, my guess is that windows is remembering the settings, as the stick obviously does not.

The O/S does indeed store the settings used to operate the device... Saying that though, it shouldn't need to be 'safely removed' each time to get it to boot up properly... Maybe you should try re-installing drivers for it?

In the case of the memory stick, i've actually completely broken one by pulling it out whilst in operation. That was some years ago, and i haven't doen that again!

M

noxidjkram@hotm · 16 Jun 2007 at 21:51

Ricki said:
As I understand it all this "Safely Remove Hardware" does is to make sure that the device is not currently being used by a program and that no data is going back or forth between the PC and the device. In which case as long as you leave sufficient time between last accessing or transfering data then you should be fine to yank the device out. I can't imagine the sudden lack of power through the devices from disconnecting them would damage it as surely pluging it in the first place would cause more damage and therefore there should be a "Safely Attach Hardware" function?

The problem is that the O/S sometimes delays writes of information to the pen. Therefore it may be the case that your information has yet to be written to the device when you pull it out. Something to do with efficient use of the processor I think...

From a power point of view, yanking it out will do no harm that I know of.

M