The correct way to remove a hard drive from dock?

[neworldman]

Hello.. I have THIS docking station. What is the correct way to take the hard drives in and out? Do I have to turn power off with the switch or unplug(eject) the esata or usb cable from the the pc first? Don't want to corrupt my hard rive info when swapping.

[MilesAhead]

Hello.. I have THIS docking station. What is the correct way to take the hard drives in and out? Do I have to turn power off with the switch or unplug(eject) the esata or usb cable from the the pc first? Don't want to corrupt my hard rive info when swapping.

With my docks I run sync.exe from SysInterals:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897438.aspx

to make sure the disk buffers are flushed. You can try the Windows "safely remove hardware" or USB Safely Remove/Zentimo. But if explorer will not let go, then just flush the buffers with sync.exe and power down the box. Some people like to just pull the drive out hot, as in still spinning, but I don't see the advantage as it can't do the drive much good to have gyroscopic forces applied to it.

As long as you sync and wait for the drive to be inactive you should be ok. (By inactive I mean you flush, see the activity light indicate the buffers have flushed to disk, then the light goes out.. IOW, not in the middle of a copy or other disk access.)

Some docks say not to remove the drive until it is "safely removed" via Windows but often explorer will just not let go of it(and the options on USB Safely Remove to "force" it to let go usually don't work anyway.)

Sometimes you can safely remove but most often not. Periodically run scandisk using Explorer => Properties -> Tools with Automatically Fix File System Errors DISABLED. Uncheck the box first. It should tell you there are no problems. The reason you uncheck the Automatic Fix box is Windows will usually say it can't check the drive because it is in use if you don't. You really don't want to reboot just to do chkdsk esp. if there's no problem.

I have BlacX USB 2.0, Sharkoon and SIIG USB 3.0 docks. Sync.exe does the trick for all of them.