Click the “Hardware and Eject Media – icon”Ī pop-up message box will appear listing the external devicesĪfter a few seconds, you will get the notification that it is now safe.It's therefore not safe to eject it, but then, it is never truly safe to eject (or do anything else) with a drive which has a buggy firmware.įor instance, here is a random HDD manual which says: If the drive's firmware is written incorrectly, it may announce that it's ready to be ejected while still busy with important stuff. If the drive's firmware is written correctly, it announces to Windows that it's ready to be ejected when it is. Usually it is, do what the user manual says Nothing about the routine 10 blinks on eject. This produces 7 results (or 8 results if I replace with ), mainly about problems. Some other posts come up, mainly to do with troubleshooting, but nothing to do with the routine 10 blinks on eject. Searching Google: is it safe to unplug blinking +LED usb I got a whole bunch of tips about how to safely unplug USB drives, but nothing to do with the USB. Searching Google: is it safe to unplug flashing usb I'm looking for answers that reference credible sources regarding what the drive does during the shutdown blinking sequence, to understand whether unplugging during that sequence is safe. I've tried finding an authoritative answer, even checking on Seagate's and Toshiba's websites, looking at the datasheet in the case of Toshiba. So, is it safe to unplug the hard drive while its LED is still blinking? That sounds like a rather long time just to park heads, though, with each blink lasting about a second. The 10 blinks represent a safety margin for the drive to park its heads. However, the 10 blinks still take place if there was a long delay between writing and ejecting, or if there wasn't any (intentional) writing at all. This would explain why any non-zero amount of writes produces a fixed delay on eject. There is a fixed latency between the OS flushing its write buffers and the writes getting physically encoded. The 10 blinks are just a courtesy to make it easier to identify which drive was ejected when multiple drives are plugged into a single computer. Likewise, it's still the same 10 blinks when the drive is written to extensively, then ejected. Although the OS is limited to seeing the completed buffer-flush whereas the drive's firmware can detect when the writes have completed, the 10 blinks happen even when the drive is just plugged in and immediately ejected with no writes at all. The blinking happens after the OS says it is "Safe to Remove Hardware". I've used a number of external 1TB to 4TB HDDs by Toshiba and Seagate, and they all consistently blink their LEDs about 10 times when ejected.
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