My Passport Essential: Power/Activity LED won't turn off after Safely Removing the HD

I’ve got my first Western Digital Hard disk: a 500GB_ My Passport Essential_ days ago, and since then, I’ve been using it alot for backing up my music, photos, movies, games, etc. etc. by just using the old “dragging & drop” method cuz I personally found Smartware useless for me, so I uninstalled it on my laptop.

I have read in the user’s manual that I must wait the drive’s LED to turn off before disconnecting it, but the problem is that every time I want to disconnect the drive, the drive’s LED doesn’t turn off at all and the disk keeps spinning after selecting “Safely remove hardware” (Windows OS).

So I’m wondering if there is some kind of solution instead of using Smartware for this issue, cuz i’m beginning to worry about that I may be hurting my HD by extracting it when it’s still “on” and I really don’t want to mess it up.

Please guys, any suggestion/help you provide will be so much appreciated.

Thank you.

I think you just click on USB and the drive should spin down by itself but it mentions using the smartware icon. Did you leave any files or folders open by chance?  If you scroll down a little farther it mentions Older/Legacy products, before Smartware. My take is to click on the remove USB and select and when prompted to push stop button. Hope that helps.

Well, first of all, Thank you so much for replying!

Second, after transfering files to the drive, I always close all active windows, check the drive’s LED for being sure it’s not flashing, and wait for some moment to leave the drive without any “activity”, also, I often open the Task Manager to find if there’s some process that may be using the drive before selecting the “Safely Remove Hardware” option. Yet, after removing the drive safely, I can still feel that its disc is still spinning inside of it .

By the way, I have noticed that everytime I got a file deleted moved to the Window’s recycle bin, it will be shown inside my WD drive aswell (in the hidden folder named “$Recycle.Bin” ) which I think it is kind of weird; or is it supposed to be like that?

I don’t think the drive will spin down automatically by itself unless the Smartware is installed. I’ve got a My Book Pro and If I don’t use the WD Drive manager I have to shut it down manually with the switch. The recycle bin is just a hidden Windows file

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So, in other words, removing/unpluging the external hard drive by simply selecting the “Safely remove hardware” won’t harm it at all? Because that is what I fear the most.

I too would like to know the answer to this question.  In my case, “safely remove” causes the LED light to go from being on solid (as is normally the case while it is actively plugged in to my computer) to blinking.  “Safely remove” (under WinXP, as I’m not using the WDSmartWare) is what causes the LED to start blinking, but it never stops.  It never totally shuts down and turns the light off as it should.  So I am forced to unplug the drive while it’s in that blinking state.  I’m not comfortable with it and feel like it’s probably not good for my drive.

Anyone realize if this is safe, or if we have any other option to not use SmartWare and be safe?