After writing the previous article about backing up, I was confronted again about whether or not to click that little “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the lower right corner before unplugging my new USB backup drive.
And looking around on the web, it’s going to depend on who you trust for advice. The problem lies in how and when the computer is writing to the drive. Obviously unplugging something when it’s in use is a bad idea. For USB hard drives (and flash/thumb drives) there is usually an indicator that the drive is in use. For my Toshiba drive there’s a little blue light that blinks when in use, and stays steady when it’s not in use, but plugged in.
I’ve been pulling out USB devices out of computers since USB was made available, knowing well there was a “safer” way to remove it – click once on the little green arrow icon, and click the option to remove the drive. I’ve never had trouble doing so with Windows XP and USB devices. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble pulling out a device that was sitting idle. So why would stopping the device first be safer?
The Microsoft response to this was written when XP was still in BETA, and you can read it here. The article says that older operating systems – Windows 2000, 98, 95 – used to write to the drive at different times, called a “caching policy”. The idea was that it could give the computer user more control by writing to the drive when the computer was less busy. And with previous versions of Windows we would see a warning that we did not safely remove the device. Kind of scary! This has been removed in XP because they got rid of the caching policy that delays writing to the drive. This is getting more technical than I thought it would, so I apologize for the jargon.
So what did we learn?
- If your device (hard drive, thumb drive, etc.) has an indicator that lets you know that it’s just sitting there, idle, feel free to pull that USB cable with confidence. There’s no harm.
- If you need to unplug your device while it’s busy, use the safely remove hardware icon to help you. Otherwise you risk corrupting the data, possibly making the drive unreadable. Bad for backups!
- Finally, it comes down to habit. If you’ve seen that warning about yanking out the USB cable (and once could be enough) you might be using the “safely remove hardware” icon to be safe and not sorry. And if you do, it won’t hurt your device one bit.
3 Responses
Thank you for being here. I’m been advised by Google to “back up” my system and have it wiped, in fact I just purchased a disk drive and was going to call them tom. My question to you is, should I unplug my USB cable tonight? Or should I let it alone to see what it writes?
In any event, thanks again for being here, because I’m sure you made more sense to me than I am making to you~
Let me know if you can help~
Ann
Hey again, I wrote Google, when I meant to write Dell. I bought my computer from Dell, and still have a warranty.
Well, it just goes to show, there’s a lot to be said for proofreading.
Sorry for the typo~ To you and to Google.
Ann
two questions regarding this icon – often I lose my wifi connection and will remove the usb air card yet the icon remains on the tray. No device is listed in the window. When this happens, I am unable to get my computer to shut off and must force off the power (then reboot again). What is causing this (repeatedly) to happen and can I go to a registry somewhere to shut off the “safely remove hardware” program when the icon is present despite no USB being connected?
Secondly, I often get a prompt (over and over and over) that “this device can work more quickly if plugged into …” or some similarly worded message. Often I can’t get that prompt to quit appearing unless the device (my aircard) is fully installed and operating. The little check box in that popup that says “do not show again” does not keep the same message from popping right back up again. Can THAT message be found and disabled in the registry? (I am on Vista home with a Compaq pressario). Neither is a serious issue, but over time has gotten very frustrating and the icon freezing my OS is building up a LOT of lost time spent rebooting.