You know those fancy new PCs with fifteen different kinds of ports on the front for SD, MMC, CF, Memory Stick, and other things?
If you look in My Computer, you will see those ports shown as additional drives such as E:, F:, G:, H:.
With a standard USB thumb drive, I have always used the “Safely remove hardware” icon in the system tray to shut down the device prior to yanking the thumb drive.
But, when I tried this with a PC equipped with front-panel memory ports yesterday it worked too well. Instead of simply shutting down my SD card so I could unplug it, all of the ports were shut down. Until I reboot, the computer totally ignores anything plugged into the ports since the device has been shut off.
There has to be a “right way” to do this so that I can shuffle through a pile of SD cards without having to risk data loss and without having to reboot between each card.
Youy are making it more complicated than it is. The “right” way is simply to put the card in when you want to read it and pull it out when you are done. What you are referencing is the proper way to remove a whole USB device and that is not what you are doing here.
It may depend on the driver, but on my system you can open Explorer or My Computer, right click on the drive and choose Eject. This releases just that drive, not the entire USB device.
This is what I’ve always done. Just plug the card in, and pull it out. Just don’t play around with it while the computer is accessing data on the card and, I believe, you should be fine.
Right. Just to clarify, I think the OP was missing the key difference between this type of drive and a thumb drive. With a thumb drive, you are removing an entire USB device from the system and it is considered a good idea to let Windows disconnect it properly. You are just removing the media here, not the entire USB device. Just don’t pull out the media when you think it may be written/read. That is the way they are meant to be used just like a floppy drive.
I thought the point was to allow Windows to close any open files and clear the cache. Why should it make a difference whether you’re disconnecting an entire USB device or just the media?
The primary point for that is to allow Windows to close out any processes for USB devices to allow the device itself to be disconnected. This was mainly to minimize problems in Window itself, largely unnecessary for XP, and you aren’t disconnecting USB devices here to begin with.
I suppose that disconnecting the entire USB device virtually guarantees that data can’t be corrupted through an inadvertent read/write operation during removal but that is a little overkill. Did you disconnect your floppy drives every time you took out a disk?
It is ridiculous to suppose that drives are designed that so a whole group of them need to be manually disconnected everytime you want to remove media from any of them.
Didn’t you read my first post? The driver has a function to disconnect one specific drive. At least that was the case with the two memory card readers I’ve owned. Are you suggesting this function is completely necessary, and only there for the peace of mind of the user?
No, I am saying that you only need to disconnect drives when you are removing the actual drive itself, not the media. Media readers are built so that you just take out the media when you want just like a little floppy drive. Like a floppy drive, you shouldn’t do it when you suspect there is any reading or writing going on. I am sure that someone, somewhere has had their data corrupted by removing a card at the wrong instant but that is not typical. Disconnecting the whole drive just to remove a card probably won’t hurt anything but I assign it to the idea of overkill.