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Zoplax

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Storix 20GB USB HD and Windows 2000

A friend of mine recently installed a Storix USB drive.

He was expecting a truly hot-swappable drive, but was dismayed to find out that the drive appears to need to be manually ejected (via the eject hardware systray icon) in Windows 2000.

I'm not familiar with these drives; has anyone played around with these and discovered a way to eliminate the need to manually eject the device?
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jhance

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magarity

You can try turning off all caching for the drive and then remove it when you want to anyway.  Right-click the drive in My Computer - Properties - Hardware - highlight drive - Properties - Disk Properties - uncheck "write cache enabled".

While this will PROBABLY work if you are careful, keep in mind USB is rather slow and may still be writing even after Windows is ready to go again.  Make sure the activity light on the unit has stopped blinking away.  I don't guarantee this scheme will never crash and burn, data-wise, but it sounds pretty good.
Whether caching is on or not, you DO NOT know whether or not Windows is writing to the drive or not....
Did I promise that it was foolproof?  And does it not have an activity light to let you know when there is activity?

But this is all besides the point.  Zoplax, the definition of 'hot swappable' is that the system does not need to be turned off to add or remove the device.  At no time does "hot swappable" promise anything about just yanking the device without notifying the operating system, although there are some types of devices that the OS does not care about.  If these types of devices led you or your friend to believe this was part of the definition, you were mistaken.
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Thanks, talked with my friend and they prefer to take the safe route.  Plus this drive doesn't appear to have an activity light, only a power LED which stays on steadily.