Unable to safely remove My Passport

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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I have just purchased a My Passport 4Tb drive. Installed the WD software and performed my first backup, which completed successfully. However, I cannot disconnect the drive from my laptop. I click the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media icon in the system tray and select Eject My Passport 2627. The My Passport LED blinks and a dialog box appears with the message “Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device. "This device is currently in use. Close any programs or windows that might be using the device and then try again”. Closed all the windows and tried again. Same dialog box.

I started a chat with WD and the operative suggested using the WD Drive Utilities software to eject the drive. Tried this, but got the same (or similar) dialog box.

In Device Manager > Disk Drives > WD My Passport > (right click) > Properties > Policies the default selection is Quick Removal under which it says “…you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon”. When I told the WD operative he said this is not recommended!.

The only solution he could come up with was to close down my laptop and then remove the drive! Not very practical or convenient if I have to do that every time!
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Has anyone else had this problem and is there a solution?

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Bobby_B…I too went down this Safe Eject issue with a message. Posted my remarks here: My passport won't shut down properly. Help please - #6 by ex672c

  • basically I chose the Better Performance instead of the Quick Removal…now I can safely eject without a warning…Be careful, because you still could have an active app running and get in trouble…say like a movie in the background, backup/copy/viewing of files. Make sure you really close any visible app from the screen.
  • see my jul22/23 replies in the above link. What happens if you look at Task Manager utility, there are many WD tasks being active and running in the background that may be why we got the original warning message.
  • the safe eject is definitely the best and safest form of eject…I use it also for flash drives that may not even have Eject available when rt mouse Eject. I ran into a corrupted file once when I forced eject a movie that was minimized and playing…File Explorer went nuts when trying to touch this file…I just don’t touch it any more and still on my PC.
  • a 4TB drive is fat, but don’t get carried away trying to back up all kind of stuff…I’ve seen posters running out of space. I re-iterate my 4mill cache2 files that I was backing up from Mozilla, before I found the folder and deleted off my backup…