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Removing HD without "Safely Remove Hardware", bad to do?

I

imported_Jid

Member
I've a BlacX HD dock that I pop 3.5" drives into for backups and such, my MOBO has an eSata port that works great in Win7 but is unusable in Boot media like acronis and other recovery/imaging tools. So, I went out and bought an eSata bracket to connect to one of the internal SATA ports. This works great with the Acronis bootable disk and in Windows I can pretty much "hotswap" at will, however the disk never pops up in the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" tray icon so I swap out drives by pressing the power button on the dock and I've turned off "Write Caching" on them.

Is it bad to remove drives without using the tray icon? With the MOBO eSata port and new drivers everything worked as it should in windows but because of that boot media problem I needed a workaround, but this seems to have it's own issues.
 
I just wait till the dock activity light stops going and I power down the dock. I don't know how to get the drive to show in "Safely Remove...", the 2 internal drives show but they're on the 6Gb/s Marvell controler and the eSata bracket is on one of the regular SATA II ports. I installed all the drivers and AHCI enabled etc.

So doing it the way I'm doing it is not a good idea then eh? I'll have to use the MOBO eSata for Win and switch to the other port for disk imaging and recovery in Acronis boot I guess. 🙁
 
Bad idea in most cases. If it is not the system drive, and several minutes have gone by, it will probably have no adverse effect. But, I zapped an external doing that last year - forunately I was able to recover it from a backup drive.
 
Ok, 2 votes for "don't do it" is enough for me. So the question now is, does anyone have an idea why an eSata bracket connected to an internal SATA port won't show up in the "Safely Remove.." tray thingie in Windows? I've set AHCI so the other 2 internals show up but the external never does yet hotswaps (which I'll stop doing now)
 
imported_Jid said:
I've a BlacX HD dock that I pop 3.5" drives into for backups and such, my MOBO has an eSata port that works great in Win7 but is unusable in Boot media like acronis and other recovery/imaging tools. So, I went out and bought an eSata bracket to connect to one of the internal SATA ports. This works great with the Acronis bootable disk and in Windows I can pretty much "hotswap" at will, however the disk never pops up in the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" tray icon so I swap out drives by pressing the power button on the dock and I've turned off "Write Caching" on them.

Is it bad to remove drives without using the tray icon? With the MOBO eSata port and new drivers everything worked as it should in windows but because of that boot media problem I needed a workaround, but this seems to have it's own issues.
Click to expand...

Are you using an Intel Motherboard? If the drives aren't showing up in the "Devices" tray (they should be if you're using RAID/AHCI, which you need for hot-swap anyway), then download Intel's RST - Rapid Storage Technology driver.
 
imported_Jid said:
Ok, 2 votes for "don't do it" is enough for me. So the question now is, does anyone have an idea why an eSata bracket connected to an internal SATA port won't show up in the "Safely Remove.." tray thingie in Windows? I've set AHCI so the other 2 internals show up but the external never does yet hotswaps (which I'll stop doing now)
Click to expand...

What motherboard, and what drivers are you using ?
 
I've found that if you use the msahci driver you get the safely remove option whilst you don't with the intel iaStor driver.
 
if the drive is powered by usb - think about what you are doing. essentially unplugging a device hot without any ground. bzzt.
 
Emulex said:
if the drive is powered by usb - think about what you are doing. essentially unplugging a device hot without any ground. bzzt.
Click to expand...

Also, if write cache is enabled on the device, you may or may not have all the data written to disk before jerking the drive out. Just depends.
 
Why is it a bad idea to remove a external drive just by powering it down and not using the safely remove hardware? I have always been doing it like this and no problems have come up from it.

So when you do use the safely remove hardware, do you still power down the enclosure before removing the drive?
 
yes! always! remember alot of external enclosures power the controller electronics from the usb side and just uses the power cube for the drive's 12V/5V needs. so you have two separately powered set of electronics.

just do the right thing and eject. it doesn't cost any time
 
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