Safely Remove Hardware?

[Guest]

I just noticed an icon on my lower toolbar, "Safely Remove Hardware." When I
click on it, it identifies my USB mass storage device.
What is this for? Am I supposed to click it every time I disconnect a USB
device--my flash memory stick, my camera, etc?
I'm running XP Professional.
Thanks.

 

[Ron Bogart]

In

I just noticed an icon on my lower toolbar, "Safely Remove Hardware."
When I click on it, it identifies my USB mass storage device.
What is this for? Am I supposed to click it every time I disconnect a
USB device--my flash memory stick, my camera, etc?
I'm running XP Professional.
Thanks.

Yes - you answered your own questions.

 

[Curt]

In XP, USB devices are hot pluggable. meaning you can unplug them without
having to go through that routine. I do it all the time with no adverse
effect. You can hide the remove hardware icon by doing so in your taskbar
properties.

 

[Guest]

And what happens if I just pull it out?

In

Yes - you answered your own questions.

--
Ron Bogart {} ô¿ô¬
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -
"Life is what happens while we are making other plans."

 

[Don MI]

When you right click on the "Safely Remove Hardware", you should get a
listing of which devices need to be disconnected from Windows before you can
safety physically disconnect the device.

Usually you get the icon for external mass storage devices such as hard
drives. Windows has a cache for data being written to mass storage devices.
If you physically disconnect the device before the cache data has been
written to the device, bad things can happen to Windows and your data. The
purpose of "Safely Remove Hardware" is to compete any pending operations and
remove the device from Windows so that you can safely physically disconnect.

You can at times physically disconnect such a device without any problem
because there are no pending operations. When you do so, you are taking a
risk.

When you right click on the icon you should get a message " Safely Remove
Hardware". When you left click on the message, you should get a list of the
specific hardware.

Don

 

[Ron Bogart]

In

In XP, USB devices are hot pluggable. meaning you can unplug them
without having to go through that routine. I do it all the time with
no adverse effect. You can hide the remove hardware icon by doing so
in your taskbar properties.

Very bad advice, to tell someone that I do the wrong thing all the time so
it is alright for you also. You can risk loss of data or worse loss of
functionality for the drive. The 'Safely remove..." functionality allows
the system to cleanly clear any cashed writes and release the USB hardware
from the system.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You would be playing "Russian roulette" with your data on the USB device.
It may work 99% of the time but then when you desperately want to save
something, you may loose it. XP needs to properly close files and flush the
USB "buffers"/filters in order to make sure the USB device data is good.

 

[Alex Nichol]

And what happens if I just pull it out?

You may get away with it; may not. The point is that while you can
safely pull the plug on USB without Hardware minding, you might have
some program running in the middle of data transfer, and cutting that
off could be disastrous, possibly causing a hang or crash in the
program, probably leaving a file in disarray. Hence this device, to
make sure all transfers are properly shut down and tidy, and only them
let you know things are safe