This might be a stupid question, but I’ve noticed that my easystore’s light is still blinking even after I click to safely remove it. It’s just a slow steady on and off blink, almost as if it’s on standby or something. Should I be worried that it’s still not safe to remove it as long as the light’s blinking at all? Or is that just what it normally does when it’s okay to take it out? I haven’t given it much thought until today, and I’ve never encountered any problems with it, but I can’t help but wonder. I just always assumed that the light doesn’t go off until it’s actually removed.
Every single hard drive i own with a LED will still blink after it’s been “Safely Ejected”
Remember, there’s still 5 Volts going through the USB Port while it’s physically connected. As long as your OS (eg. Windows) reports that it was safely ejected, then it’s safe to remove.
Yeah, I figured it was probably a dumb question. I just figured I’d double-check as I remember reading a superuser thread where they basically said that as long as the light’s on at all that it’s never safe to remove it. Sounded like paranoia to me, but I’d rather ask and be sure than not ask and regret it. Thanks, JoeySmyth.
But, a good type of paranoia is to always have a backup of all your data stored on the 2TB Easystore.
Any hard drive, doesn’t matter what brand or type or how well you take care of could fail. It’s happened to me many years ago, but now i always have a mirror backup of all my data. eg 4TB hard drive full of movies, have another 4TB with a backup of the same movies.
This forum is filled with posts about people losing their data and not having a backup.
Buying additional hard drives for backup purposes is a lot cheaper than a data recovery service to retrieve your data.
I just opened a similar post on my WD Elements portable that also blinks slowly after being ejected. The trouble is I contacted customer support and they say it SHOULD stop blinking.
I find this very frustrating. Does everyone’s keep blinking while connected to usb after ejecting successfully and if so why doesn’t customer support know this? Why is there no users manual that explains this?
That is exactly what they told me when I asked them. They insisted that it shouldn’t be blinking and that there’s something wrong if it is. That’s obviously wrong because I have several drives that all do the same thing, and they work just fine. I’m just a bit perplexed as to why WD doesn’t know this about their own drives.
Thanks for replying! It is driving me nuts. It’s a brand new drive but I already backed up personal data so I don’t want to return the drive. There really is no way to obliterate that data and I don’t want to worry about my identity being stolen… more than I already do!
