Advice sought about a problem that’s only appeared since a recent reinstall of Windows on my PC.
I have an external USB-3.0 HDD that I only power on when I want to do an occcasional back up, turning it off again when everything is where it should be. However since reinstalling Windows 7 Pro on a bigger SDD drive (all of my personal data is on the same spinning disk drive as before), the ‘safely remove drive’ feature doesn’t work in the same, convenient way.
Previously, clicking the ‘safely remove’ icon would present the expected message that the device could be safely removed, before the external drive would power itself down within five seconds, after which I would pull the plug from the power socket.
Now clicking on ‘safely remove’ seems to work for the first part, returning the appropriate message, but the drive only keeps spinning. Only turning the computer off completely, or pulling the power to the drive itself, makes the external drive spin down completely.
I’m at a loss to think what settings are different from my previous setup that result in this – help please!
When using the Safely remove icon is the actual drive identified there, or just mass storage device?
Look at the properties section for the disk drive in Device Manager. There are options there that affect how the drive functions. The default setting in Windows 7 is to allow fast removal without using the Safely Remove Icon. There is also an option to improve performance without risk if you have a separate power supply powering the drive.