Cannot use SafelyRemoveHardware to disconnect external HDD

Hello everybody,

When disconnecting USB flash drives, I for one never use the Safely Remove Hardware button, and never had any problems as a result of this habbit, probably because I always leave write caching disabled, as it is by default - according to the Windows Help, this means you can disconnect a drive without going through Safely Remove Hardware.

Now, I have recently bought an external hard-drive (a Samsung Story Station), which I use on and off, several times per day. Since an electro-mechanical hard-drive is surely more fragile than a solid-state USB flash drive, and also because this HDD cost me quite a lot, I though it wouldn't hurt to develop the good practice of always using Safely Remove Hardware before turning its power off.

The problem is, most of the time this process is not straightforward, and produces the error message "The Device 'Generic Volume' cannot be stopped because a program is still accessing it". This happens at a time when the HDD is (at least to my knowledge) no longer in use, i.e. I've copied a few files to/from it, and the transfer has stopped for a few good minutes before I press the Safely Remove Hardware button.

I know there may be many reasons why Windows sees the hard-drive as still being in use, but my question to all you hardware-aware techies is: how harmful is it for the hard-drive if I just turn the power off after I've finished using it (no ongoing transfers, of course) without using Safely Remove Hardware? Again, this would be at a time when Windows is under the impression that the HDD is still being used, even though - mind you - the HDD's led is NOT blinking, indicating that there is in fact no activity.

Thanks in advance for any replies!

Oftentimes, the problem is that you have a Windows Explorer window open to the drive in question. If you close all your Explorer windows, then you will be able to use the applet, which tells the drive to park the heads and removes the drive from the list of accessible devices, among other things.

Any programs that are expecting that drive to be online will likely fault or freeze if you remove the drive unexpectedly by turning it off. Depending on the program, you could crash Win itself and have to reboot the machine, and thus cause problems with data on your main drive.

Assuming that you are correct and the drive is no longer writing to disk (that is, everything in the buffer is already transferred), powering off the drive probably won't have any deleterious effects. However, if the heads are not parked, and there's no guaranty the drive will park them after it finishes its writing, then the act of transporting the device could cause physical damage, which would be very bad, indeed.

Sometimes I have problems with Explorer windows holding a device. Close them and try again, and I get it to work.


Turning the power off on the drive without doing the Safely Remove bit - it's generally not desirable. When the operating system tells the device to go away, it stops the platters and puts the drive in a state safe to power off.

If you just power it off and it's not in use, you lose that protection. But is it a big deal? Probably not. I'm still very careful about it, though if you think about it - how many times has your computer locked up, and you had to kill the power?

Many thaks for both your replies. I'm afraid Windows Explorer was already closed at the time that I tried to Safely Remove Hardware, so I'm not sure what else I can do... Surely the process that "keeps an eye" on the HDD and prevents Windows from disconnecting it is one that can be seen in TaskMan, I just don't know which one. Wouldn't it be good if WIndows were so kind as to actually *tell you* what process that is?

What programs do you have running?

Well at the time I wasn't running any because I'd closed everything in order to make it possible for the HDD to be disconnected, although apparently that wasn't enough!