Is Your C-Drive On A USB Connection?
- 4
- Add a Comment
A real quickie here.
We just got a new Systemax PC at work to act as server for a surveillance camera system. Being constitutionally unable not to poke around in a computer’s nether regions, I noticed some interesting things about the hard disk hookup. Looked suspiciously like a USB connection.
Going down to the system tray, I clicked on the “Safely remove” icon and, sure enough, up popped Safely uninstall: Hitachi HDT725025VLA380 - Drive :C.
I did not click on it.
I suggest that if you’ve gotten a PC in the past year or so, and aren’t familiar with the “Safely remove” function (normally used to remove plug-and-play accessories), you might want to click on the icon — carefully — one time, and see what pops up. I’m not certain, but it seems to me that shutting down your hard drive, which is what the function does, could be a real pain in the butt. It might just require you to restart your computer, but there is a potential for other problems. I’d want to know a lot more about it before I did it on purpose. Perhaps a reader can enlighten us further.
And hey… be careful in there.
4 Comments
Russ Jackson
July 21st, 2008
at 4:22pm
The good news is if you tried to disconnect, it would just tell you that it can’t disconnect the drive at this time. It has to stop I/O and it would never be able to do it on your active c: partition. While it sounds like a bit of a crazy thing, it probably would stop you before you shot yourself in the foot. :)
Larry Labre
July 21st, 2008
at 5:13pm
probably not USB - more likely SATA
SATA = new interface for hard disks and optical drives
SATA hardware is recognized as ‘removable’ hardware
Aryeh Goretsky
July 21st, 2008
at 8:28pm
Hello,
I think it would be very unusual to use the USB bus for a PC’s primary hard disk drive unless it was to connect something like a flash drive. From what I understand, though, the Hitachi HDT725025VLA380 is a 250MB 7200RPM SATA hard disk drive.
Perhaps Systemax chose a motherboard which has no SATA ports and chose to use a USB to SATA bridge to connect the hard disk drive?
If the motherboard does have SATA ports, it might be interesting to connect the hard disk drive directly to one and then apply power to the computer to see if it boots up.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Idle
July 24th, 2008
at 10:34pm
This is quite normal behaviour for (at least) the Nvidia 4 and Ultra chipset RAID controllers under XP — I have three of them and all do it.
It’s a bit startling the first time you see it, but of course the utility won’t let you remove the active RAID drive, and to de-activate you have to shut it down in the normal way, after which the safe shutdown has already taken place, so the question becomes pretty much academic.