I unplugged my external hard drive without "Safely Remove" Can this damage laptop/external harddrive?

After I finished transferred some files across from external hard drive to laptop and I used a picture from external hard drive as my background desktop but when I tried to click "Safely "remove it said there were programs running yet I have nothing transferring so I just unplugged the USB device.

I did noticed when I removed the external hard drive my background picture was gone.I'm worried if I have damaged laptop/external hard drive or corrupt software.

 

It can damage the external hdd specially if there's some writing or reading going on (background process maybe).

I've had my share of usb drives failing because of this and an external harddrive getting some bad sectors (although it's hard to pinpoint the cause, it did show up after running scandisk after few hot unplugs)



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Depends on whether the drive is being used or not. If you are not performing any Read/Write Operations on the drive then it is fairly safe to remove the Hard Drive but as a good practise always Safely Remove the hard drive. As the drive gets older I would recommend always removing it safely.

 

Data corruption will occur. Not always but its bound to catch up to you if you're not always "Safely Removing" any storage device. Why risk it? Take the extra couple seconds to ensure your drive remains corruption-free!

 

I think its also probably 100% safe to unplug a drive if your laptop is on standby.

No need to close your laptop, then go "oh crap" and open it up again just to "safely" remove the drive.

 

If write cache is enabled ("Best Performance" option), then you're more likely to corrupt or lose data if you don't properly eject the drive from the OS first. If write cache ("Quick Removal" option) is selected, then you're far less likely to damage or lose data, at the expense of slower write speeds.

 

What happen when windows wont let you eject. I know ive encountered it many times.

Maybe you opened up a folder full of jog via acdsee, then while acdsee is loading the thumbnail, you closed it. But in the background something is still tying to generate the thumbnail.

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This has happened to me countless of times. When my storage drive fails to safely disconnect (even though I've closed everything alread) is to:

1. Save all my other work, close everything, then "Log off." Log back in, and now you should be able to safely remove your storage device.
2. "Restart" you computer, when you're back on the desktop, now safely disconnect your storage device.
3. Lastly, simply "Shut down" your computer. Afterwards, safely disconnect your storage device.

This is what I found works for me in these situations. Its annoying at times to have to do this but maybe this is an issue with the OS, not the storage drive. I'm not sure. Maybe someone else here knows why this occurs and can shed some light on the subject.

 

To be very clear, as others have said data corruption is the concern. And as said a setting to stop disk caching that even says in Windows this allows the save removal of device without the use of the "safe eject".

Now for the clarity, as much as things in life are never 100%, your risk of hardware/physical damage to the HDD are 100% not an issue. All current HDD's will either park the heads or lock them safely above the disks.

Most external HDD's won't even allow the write cache. But yes it is best to use the safe removal option. Or you watch the blinking light but make no mistake these are for data loss/corruption issues not physical damage.

 

Glad to know that modern HDDs does this, the drive that got corrupted on my previous post were in the 5gb-10gb days which I'm sure didn't have this feature because you could have bad sectors during power failures and unsafely removing external drives lol

 

Your showing your age. My first was 11.2GB I think. I am so old in highschool we didn't have HDD's. We had to load the OS at each startup, and from a floppy, the paper feeling kind.

Because of what happened with users like you I am certain is why this is no longer an issue.

 

There is probably a way to end the process or service that would cause the USB drive to hang up, but I'm not sure what it shows up as within task manager.

There's also this: Safely Remove Hardware better alternative