On my new computer the ‘safely remove hardware’ tab in the systray offers to remove my 200 GB hard drive. Since it’s the only hard drive on the machine, should this be happening?
And no, I’m not going to try to use the utility to remove the hard drive, I’m just surprised it’s offered as an option.
Your operating system cares not if the hard drive is permanently installed inside the computer case or it is a separate external device. The O/S allows you to create/disengage the software connection (drivers? plug-n-play?) as you see fit.
Put it another way. If you install a second internal hard drive, you physically install the device and make all the physical connections. When you turn on the computer the O/S recognizes the new device and makes a software connection to it so that you can use it. You can easily “remove” the hardware device via the same method you describe. All you are doing is removing the software connection. You would still need to power down the computer and physically disconnect/remove it from the computer.
For whatever reason, Windows views SATA hard drives as removable devices. Good old PATA devices are not listed. Never tried to do it, though, as my SATA drive is my boot drive, and my other two PATA drives are just for data.
That makes sense. It’s just that I’ve only used that utility to remove USB drives. I was surprised that it would offer the drive the OS was on as an option.
Um, I should also say that on two other machines that I’ve used that on, it didn’t offer a hard drive as an option. The only difference is that on those two PC’S the hard drives were IDE, and on the other it was SATA.
My hard drive is IDE and I don’t get the choice to remove it, thank God, or I probably would have tried long ago out of curiosity.