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Hard Drive in external enclosure, turning on/off

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Davidj2

Junior Member
I have a Western Digital SATA II HHD in an external enclosure (adc MAPOWER 3.5" Model AE31-F) and I am using it with and eSATA cable, not USB. The enclosure is powered by an electrical "Brick" plugged in to a conventional electric outlet. There is a switch on the enclosue to turn the enclosure on or off. According to Western Digital Knowledge Base answer ID 486 "Connecting or disconnecting an eSATA drive require you to shut the computer down before connecting or disconnecting the drive." My question is: If I have been backing up data to this drive and I am finished using it, do I have to shut down the computer when I want to turn the power switch on the enclosure to OFF? Same thing if I want to send data to the enclosure HDD, would I have to shut down the computer before I turned the enclosure switch ON, or does it matter, as long as I an not trying to disconnect the eSATA cable?
 
YMMV; SATA "hotplug" support (and turning off the drive power is in many ways equivalent to just disconnecting it from the computer as far as the computer or drive is concerned) is not that well developed in the software or hardware of some systems. Some work fine, others don't.

Use the "safely remove hardware" option if you have one available listing that drive in Windows, or the "EJECT" option in the Computer / Device right click menu if you have one.

Change the POLICY for the drive in the Drive Properties to maximize data safety and allow for quick removal, do not allow write-behind / delayed write operations.

See what happens. Test it a few hundred times and see if anything gets glitchy / buggy. It will be especially telling if you can go though multiple cycles of connect / use / disconnect without Windows getting flaky. Especially if the windows PC itself can go to sleep / wake up / go to sleep / wake up and still not get confused about the presence / absence of the drive.

 
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