I bought a 1T Western Digital drive and I’ve moved my iTunes library to it, and I’m beginning to rip all my CDs to it. And I back that up to another USB HD.
I’ve heard that if you unplug the HD without using the “safely remove hardware” icon, you can lose everything on it. Is this really true? There was a power failure while I had the HD plugged in (but was not writing to it). Everything seemed okay.
After this power failure, I ran chkdsk on the HD (my pc is running Windows XP Media Edition). It took about 3 minutes and reported no errors. But when I run chkdsk on my 80G main HD, less than 1/10 the size, that takes about 5 minutes. Why the discrepancy? Does chkdsk really work correctly for the USB HD? If not, is there some other utility I can use?
depends on whether write caching is enabled on the drive. If write caching is enabled, then anything you write to that disk might not get written right away; it can be held in RAM until the OS can actually sync it to disk. Windows will generally disable write caching on any removable disks, but you might have to double check that if the external disk is formatted as NTFS. If it’s FAT32 or exFAT I think write caching is disabled by default, but it’d still be best to check.
chkdsk checks the structure of the file system. The runtime is therefore more directly proportional to the number of files on the disk, rather than the total disk capacity or amount of space used.
Your Windows hard drive probably has many more small files than the external drive (and likely some degree of fragmentation). Chkdsk is likely working just fine on the external.
The cool thing about NTFS, though, is that it is journaled. This means that an improper shutdown is less likely to cause problems. The journal is written to both before and after any operation is attempted, so if the operation fails due to power shutoff, Windows can look at the journal and see what specifically failed, and go in and fix it.
In fact, chkdsk on NTFS is rarely necessary. And, when it is, Windows is pretty good about detecting it and telling you, and then setting it up automatically.
Write caching typically holds data unwritten for a few seconds at most. That’s an eternity in computer time, but it’s not like you drag some file to the removable drive & Windows might wait 5 minutes before actually writing it to the disk.
For a large disk with lots of valuables on it, it’d be silly to not use the “safely remove hardware” option every time. After all, you’re spending bucks & effort to back it all up; why deliberately *try *to create a data loss accident every time you unplug it?
That’s what skipping “safely remove hardware” is; an attempt to cause an accident. Maybe Windows will save you from yourself, and maybe it won’t.