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General discussion

external harddrive powerdown

Apr 5, 2005 12:29PM PDT

I have an external hard drive and it says in the instructions to use the remove hardware deal of xp to disconnect it. I don't want to disconnect it. I am usinfg it for storage and was wondering if i could just shut down wondows and then the external drive, or what, Its a western digital usb drive with a power button. I don't want to have to go throught the shut down with the remove hardware thing if its possible.

Discussion is locked

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I shutdown windows and it's fine.
Apr 5, 2005 12:35PM PDT

Your choice on this one

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It's just a safety precaution
Apr 7, 2005 12:16PM PDT

Part of the shutdown of the internal drives involves completing any "write" activities. Windows does this for you. You can disconnect or remove power easily from an external but if any disk writes were in progress or incomplete, data can become corrupt or even worse. If yours are just for storage, you should have no problem. You should also be able to turn of system restore for these drives as well as Windows can't restore that sort of data anyway.