After format to NTFS, drive no longer shows up in "safely remove devices"

[iroc409]

I recently bought a WD 320Gb 2.5" external drive to use at work, upgrading my old 160. I was too lazy to re-format from FAT32 to NTFS, but did this one as soon as I plugged it in.

The problem is, with Vista Ultimate this drive never shows up with the "safely remove device" feature. In the advanced device properties, it is currently set to write caching and to be removed without using the "safely remove device" system.

So, how do I get it back to "normal", or do I need to? Is it going to be OK to just plug/unplug at will? At work this is going to be used on a Win XP system, so I'm not sure how it's going to work there, either. I've never seen this behavior before, is this something unique to Vista?

 

[Michael Daly]

If you look at the drive properties in Vista, you should see a tab that identifies whether the disk's write cache is enabled (I use XP, so I don't know how this looks exactly in Vista). If the cache is not enabled, then all writes are immediately completed and the drive is safe to remove without using the "safely remove device" feature. You may be able to re-enable the write cache and the "safely remove device" feature should reappear. This is a trade off between data security (no cache) and speed (cached writes).

 

[iroc409]

Thanks for the reply Michael. It sounds like it is set up fine then, just don't really want to lose my data. Both drive options in Vista state write caching in use, but one option says you can remove it without using the safely remove devices.

I guess it just makes me nervous that way, and not sure how my XP work laptop is going to handle it.

Thanks again!