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. Wait for "Safe To Remove Hardware" noticeĪfter the operating system declares that it is safe to unplug a USB hard drive, the LED on the drive blinks about 10 times before the drive shuts down.
External USB hard drive (not a USB stick).However, the articles tend to stop at the part where the operating system says it is safe to unplug, or where you're sure nothing is writing to the drive, etc. There is a lot of information about how to safely unplug USB hard drives.
0 kommentar(er)
