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!
is harmful i broke maybe 2 hd for that, you better find an enclosure that have a switch to turn on and off like this CompUSA.com | ULT40273 | Ultra ULT40273 3.5" Aluminus Hard Drive Enclosure this enclosure is a good one and give you a lot of features, you just need to know the size of the drive 3.5 or 2.5 and remember this is for security that help your hd from problems like this remember you can use in any pc
