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properly shutting down an external hard drive? quick question

R

rive22

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 10, 2004
Messages
4,645
Hey :)

I bought a WD 320 gig hard drive and an external enclosure for it, a really small one for good portability. My question is, all the enclosure has on the back is the little flip of a switch to immediately power it on and off. I had one of their prebuilt ones before and it took 5 seconds to power down, probably to move the head in a safe place. So I'm wondering is this safe for my drive? If it immediately powers down does that mean the head could be in the middle of the disk right over the data? So if the drive gets bumped it could scratch or something? What do you guys say? If so, is there a way I can safely power this device down? All tips welcomed.

Thanks much guys! :)
 
There should be an icon in the tray to safely unplug a device. Do that and then turn it off. You should be good.
 
I believe you are referring to "parking the heads". With OLD hard drives this was an issue but it is my understanding that modern hard drives automatically "park the heads" when you turn them off. I know I can hear my Seagate drive make some kind of noise when I turn it off. I have had my drive for about a year and a half and have had no prloblems.

When I turn my drive off I use the safely remove icon in the tasktray or turn of the PC and then I just hit the switch. No problems at all.
 
Any half way recent drive will automatically park the heads when power is cut to it.

As for 'Safely Remove Hardware' in Windows, using it is certainly a best practice. However, provided you have write caching disabled, it will be fine even if it isn't officially stopped before power is cut. If you're using NTFS (which you should), you can even recover from a write that is lost when power to the cache is lost.
 
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