Does Windows have a "park" command?

[Mark Kaine]

Or alternatively "eject" for external harddrives ?

i know the issue of not ejecting - basically turn off external storage is supposed to be fixed, except it isnt, it'll randomly say "cant eject drive because it currently is in use…" (even tho it obviously isnt) and only way to turn a drive off then is actual manually turning it off or unplugging it, which both results in "emergency parking" (of the head) which Id really like to avoid.

 

So is the "park" command still included in Windows10 or is there a program I could use?

 

 

 

 

[Kilrah]

Close task manager before ejecting if open, you'll see that commonly avoids the "unable to eject".

[Mark Kaine]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Close task manager before ejecting if open, you'll see that commonly avoids the "unable to eject".

I basically never have taskmanager open, just if i need to check something, or do you mean "windows explorer"? Because im pretty sure restarting that would fix it , but I thought just typing "park" would actually be slightly less tedious, and I was curious if it'd still work (like in DOS) but then Im also unsure if that would actually accomplish what I want (ejecting / removing a drive safely)

 

[GoodBytes]

On 6/1/2021 at 7:30 PM, Mark Kaine said:

I basically never have taskmanager open, just if i need to check something, or do you mean "windows explorer"? Because im pretty sure restarting that would fix it , but I thought just typing "park" would actually be slightly less tedious, and I was curious if it'd still work (like in DOS) but then Im also unsure if that would actually accomplish what I want (ejecting / removing a drive safely)

 

park command is to park the head of the HDD, as, back then, if you turn off the power of your system, the head would remain in place, and potentially damage the drive if the system is moved or hit.

 

Safe to ejecting drive purpose is for the OS to flush its memory onto disk, ensuring all data is written, as well as a check which ensures that no app is using the drive.

If you have anything, including file explorer, open to the drive, then Ejecting should fail.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

park command is to park the head of the HDD, as, back then, if you turn off the power of your system, the head would remain in place, and potentially damage the drive if the system is moved or hit.

 

Safe to ejecting drive purpose is for the OS to flush its memory onto disk, ensuring all data is written, as well as a check which ensures that no app is using the drive.

If you have anything, including file explorer, open to the drive, then Ejecting should fail.

yeah, i know, i just saw a video about old harddrives (ide-xt) recently and i thought if  i would be able to do park I could unplug the drive safely then since surely nothing gets written on it at that point, but i also figured windows wouldnt have this command.  Well and i always close the file explorer before ejecting… its a bit mysterious why it sometimes  gives me this message and sometimes doesnt, seems completely random and nothing should be actually accessing the drive.

it also seems to happen with any drive so its probably not an issue  with the drives themselves.

 

[GoodBytes]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, i know, i just saw a video about old harddrives (ide-xt) recently and i thought if  i would be able to do park I could unplug the drive safely then since surely nothing gets written on it at that point, but i also figured windows wouldnt have this command.  Well and i always close the file explorer before ejecting… its a bit mysterious why it sometimes  gives me this message and sometimes doesnt, seems completely random and nothing should be actually accessing the drive.

it also seems to happen with any drive so its probably not an issue  with the drives themselves.

 

In those cases, it is because Windows (or a program) hasn't finished flushing its files to disk.

The problem with HDD's and USB Flash drive (of old), is that they are very slow.. so the OS gives you the illusion of speed by going "Yea, I'll show you a progress and all, but I'll really do it later or at shutdown/restart".

 

Under Device Manager, under the Properties of your drive, you should have the options somewhere to set it to "Quick Removal", this will make Windows no longer do this. 

Now you only have programs. So, if it continues to happen, or was already set to Quick Removal, then your problem is a software on your PC not letting go.

[Mark Kaine]

14 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

The problem with HDD's and USB Flash drive (of old), is that they are very slow.. so the OS gives you the illusion of speed by going "Yea, I'll show you a progress and all, but I'll really do it later or at shutdown/restart".

That could be part of the problem - and I mean it is a problem , but seems more for usb thumbsticks than hdds/ssds (ie data loss)

I also noticed not all hdds behave the same, it takes considerably longer for this WD one to "spin down" for example, windows will say "safe to remove" but it'll keep spinning for about a minute anyways , its near silent but i can feel it still turning…

 

 

Well, i'll check the setting you mentioned , thanks.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

I also noticed not all hdds behave the same, it takes considerably longer for this WD one to "spin down" for example, windows will say "safe to remove" but it'll keep spinning for about a minute anyways , its near silent but i can feel it still turning…

Windows will tell you once it's unmounted the partition, at that point anything will be committed to the drive and indeed safe to remove. What the drive then does later is irrelevant, some will never even spin down. 

 

Drives nowadays don't care a single bit about being powered off without them having parked the heads prior to it. As mentioned on some it's not even an option.

[GoodBytes]

To add, I looked more into "park" command... if data is not fully written and you call "park", you'll corrupt the data, as it would park the head while not having the work completed. This wasn't an issue back in days because multi-tasking wasn't really a thing in DOS days. And everything was simplistic. And on top of things, people were used to 0 or little hand holding. Windows today (and even years ago), has A LOT of hand holding to prevent issues. People tend to forget how fancy an OS is.

 

I mean, the famous example is: try to delete C:\Windows folder... Windows will block you.

Go under most Linux based OS on PC as root and delete its own system files, and it will go "Sure thing boss, nice knowing you!". No "Are you sure?", no cancel, no nothing. Too late. Did a typo on the command as you wanted to delete a directory instead of the root directory (drive), too bad. Hope you did a backup of all your stuff. I can tell you many stories of me screwing up my Linux distro when I was learning this OS ages ago. Running the OS in a VM that supported save states, was a huge help to undo my screw ups. But as they say, best way to learn

 

[Mark Kaine]

8 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Windows will tell you once it's unmounted the partition, at that point anything will be committed to the drive and indeed safe to remove. What the drive then does later is irrelevant, some will never even spin down. 

ok, i get the theory, but for example my "usb to sata" adapter has 2 leds one for read/write and one for power, and the read/write will actually blink for a while sometimes  after i ejected the drive. Well I think its not as bad with harddrives, but i lost so many usb sticks, its not even funny - and i dont really know why either tbh, but since i always "eject" now it hasnt happened since… *knock on wood*

 

14 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

To add, I looked more into "park" command... if data is not fully written and you call "park", you'll corrupt the data, as it would park the head while not having the work completed.

Ah, i see, yeah that makes sense and is why ive been asking, i wasnt sure if that would actually even  be a good idea haha. I guess eject is it then, its just weird it sometimes  gives me this message about being in use, as far i can tell it doesnt go away either (ive tried waiting 20 minutes or so unsuccessfully)

 

What i do now when this happens is unplug the drive, plug it back immediately to check, because *that* is how the usb drives got corrupted in the past, me thinking "oh it wont be so bad" and then it would say "please format the drive" the next time Id try to use it.

Might be something with the "session data" but that ideally shouldnt happen obviously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kilrah]

Some removable devices continue blinking for a while after the last access "just in case", my card reader does that but it's always been fine removing the card as soon as the Windows copy dialog closed. That is actually a good indicator, Windows by default handles removable drives in a safe way, if the device has internal cache you sometimes see the dialog stay at 100% for a few seconds until the device reports it's done committing the writes.

 

I've only once had a very crappy early USB3 flash drive that had a massive cache to fake fast writes, would "write" at like 60MB/s, but there was probably about 64MB of cache so it appeared fast if the writes were small enough, but beyond that it would actually write to flash at only like 5MB/s. It also cheated on the real status so it seemed fast and if you copied a 50MB file it would take a second and the copy dialog would disappear straight away... while the drive needed another 10+ seconds to actually finish writing the data.

 

I never eject anything and other than with this crappy one never had any issue (and that one was fine as long as I waited for it to finish blinking).

[Mark Kaine]

One thing that is also weird, it usually does this when Ive not written anything to the drive… its possible its trying to make a list of the drives content or something, even though I tried to turn that off (for WMP specifically) but i'll take it that's just how it is.

[Kilrah]

Could be content indexing, Windows Defender... Or some 3rd party app more likely.