'Safely Remove Hardware' on Sandisk drives

[asdfoi83wyrl]

In the Quick Start Guide for my Sandisk USB drive, it says that in Windows XP it is not necessary to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" thing before physically removing the USB drive. They say that as long as the blue LED light (always on, flashing during transfers) is not flashing, it is safe to just yank it out.

However, most other USB drives I've used do recommend using Safely Remove Hardware. Is it necessary for my Sandisk drive, then, in this case?

[Kreuger]

I would personally do it anyway, just in case.

[vertigosity]

There's a setting in XP. It applies to any hotpluggable mass-storage device, really. The dialog box pretty much says it all.

[Quillz]

There's a setting in XP. It applies to any hotpluggable mass-storage device, really. The dialog box pretty much says it all.

I've never seen this setting in XP before. How do you get to it?

[John Veteran]

Get the properties of the removable media (usually under Hard Drives) in Device Management (run devmgmt.msc) (Y)

[asdfoi83wyrl]

Well I don't think I can do that on the school computers I'm gonna use my drive on.

If Sandisk says it's safe to not use Safely Remove Hardware, does that just mean that their drives don't support write caching?

[John Veteran]

Write caching is a feature of the operating system, not the hardware. By default, Windows disables write caching on removable drives, so you should be safe ignoring the Safely Remove Hardware wizard (Y)

[asdfoi83wyrl]

I remember a while ago the portable apps made by John Haller said that they did some kind of 'optimization' to your USB drive--not sure what it was--maybe that would make ignoring Safely Remove Hardware bad for the drive? Just wonderin'.