External Harddrive Enclosure Shutdown

[kineticdesign]

I just got a ADS Technology Firewire external harddrive enclosure for my internal harddrives. I plugged it into my laptop and it immediately recognized it as a harddrive. Now my question is, how do I shut the hard drive down? Can I just turn it off, or do I need to turn off my computer or is there some special way? Also it has a indicator light that says if it's being used, so perhaps I can turn it off whenever the light isn't on?

I tried to click on the "remove hardware" icon that pops up in the system tray, and i tried to remove it, but it said this component can't be removed at the time. So I guess that's not the way to do it.

Any ideas?

Thank you =)

 

[Lord Evermore]

That is the way to do it, but it's unreliable. Having the Indexing Service enabled seems to keep the drive from being "removed safely" because Windows thinks it's always in use, and even when I disable Indexing entirely, my external drives keep having certain things set to allow Indexing so it stops them from disconnecting.

Check the properties for the drive in Device Manager. On the Policies tab, make sure "optimize for quick removal" is selected, if it's not then select it. What that does is disable the Windows disk caching feature (not the drive's cache), so that you can simply unplug it or turn it off without worrying about data not having been written to the drive.

You get better performance with the disk cache turned on, because Windows saves up data when an application tries to write to the drive, so the application can get back to whatever else it needs to do, then Windows writes the data when the drive isn't busy. But if you unplug the drive, Windows may still have data cached and it will be lost.