HDD not ejecting in windows

I have a habit of "ejecting" any external storage e.g. flash drive, desktop HDD. Sometimes, it just does not eject, returning with error windows box stating that the drive is in use but it's actually not.
In that case , if I just force to switch off the power on the desktop HDD or just unplug the USB data cable (for 2.5 , usually without power). Would it cause a lot of wear to the hard drives?

Sometimes it really just doesn't reject

 

The thing is the drive may be in use in the background even if your not doing anything on it due to the Windows running some indexing on it etc..

So best way is to shut down your desktop and unplug it.. You can just unplug the cable while in Windows too, its not recommended as you can loose data but I've never had that issue so I just unplug it even if Windows says its still in use!

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

What I would try first before either of the suggestions above is to log out of your current user profile and then log back in.

This usually 'frees' the drive to eject it safely.

Depending on how important the data is on the drive; I would always do a full shutdown if logging in/out doesn't allow a safe eject.

 

Isn't a full shutdown practically the same thing?

I can notice that the drive doesn't stop spinning/vibration until it powers off for that instance of time. I doubt during the shutdown process, the system will have something to do with safely ejecting the discs

 

During shutdown, the system will flush any cache/buffers out to disk, close open files, etc, making it safe to detach the HD when shutdown.