• Re: 8 TB WD external drive chuntering away for hours.

    From Pancho@21:1/5 to Mike Halmarack on Sat Nov 16 10:59:22 2024
    On 11/15/24 09:51, Mike Halmarack wrote:
    I try to stand it down, using a "USB Safely Remove" utility but in the
    case of this particular drive, I get the message: "Cannot be stopped
    for now, close all applications that have open files on the disk...l"

    Then I'm given a long lists of 'System' and 'svchost' files that need
    to be closed before the disk can be stopped.

    I have several other smaller external drives which seem to only be
    active when I'm uploading or downloading files to them, which seems
    like a preferable option to me.
    Any suggestions on this?

    For a sensible answer I think you would need to list what the files
    were. In MS window you can see this with Sysinternals ProcessExplorer or
    maybe FileMon. Sorry, I can't remember exactly which tool in the
    Sysinternals suite of programs.

    In general, I have not found it difficult to shutdown USB attached HDD,
    but I have not been able to stop them from repeatedly spontaneously
    spinning up whilst attached. My use case was I wanted them permanently attached, but only waking up for daily/weekly backups and or very
    occasional on demand retrieval of archive files. I didn't figure it out,
    now I'm waiting for a spare WakeOnLan capable PC to become available.
    I'll turn the whole PC off when not using the disks. I expect this is a
    common use case, now we have cheap SSD storage, HDD are only used for
    backups.

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  • From David@21:1/5 to Mike Halmarack on Sun Nov 17 14:47:51 2024
    On Sun, 17 Nov 2024 08:47:08 +0000, Mike Halmarack wrote:

    On Sat, 16 Nov 2024 10:59:22 +0000, Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
    wrote:

    On 11/15/24 09:51, Mike Halmarack wrote:
    I try to stand it down, using a "USB Safely Remove" utility but in the
    case of this particular drive, I get the message: "Cannot be stopped
    for now, close all applications that have open files on the disk...l"

    Then I'm given a long lists of 'System' and 'svchost' files that need
    to be closed before the disk can be stopped.

    I have several other smaller external drives which seem to only be
    active when I'm uploading or downloading files to them, which seems
    like a preferable option to me.
    Any suggestions on this?

    For a sensible answer I think you would need to list what the files
    were. In MS window you can see this with Sysinternals ProcessExplorer or >>maybe FileMon. Sorry, I can't remember exactly which tool in the >>Sysinternals suite of programs.

    In general, I have not found it difficult to shutdown USB attached HDD,
    but I have not been able to stop them from repeatedly spontaneously >>spinning up whilst attached. My use case was I wanted them permanently >>attached, but only waking up for daily/weekly backups and or very >>occasional on demand retrieval of archive files. I didn't figure it out, >>now I'm waiting for a spare WakeOnLan capable PC to become available.
    I'll turn the whole PC off when not using the disks. I expect this is a >>common use case, now we have cheap SSD storage, HDD are only used for >>backups.

    There are very long lists of System and svchost.exe files said to be
    stopping me from removing this drive. I can and have used the force
    option but I'm not sure how much potential damage might be caused by
    that. Do the type of system files I mentioned directly affect my
    personal workfiles as they move to and from the drive?

    Vague memories that you can stop Windows from caching writes (which it
    does to improve performance) so that you can eject an external drive immediately with minimal risk.

    You don't have system files (such as SWAP) on there accidentally?

    Cheers



    Dave R


    --
    AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 10 x64

    --
    This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com

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  • From Pancho@21:1/5 to Mike Halmarack on Sun Nov 17 19:53:34 2024
    On 11/17/24 08:47, Mike Halmarack wrote:
    On Sat, 16 Nov 2024 10:59:22 +0000, Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
    wrote:

    On 11/15/24 09:51, Mike Halmarack wrote:
    I try to stand it down, using a "USB Safely Remove" utility but in the
    case of this particular drive, I get the message: "Cannot be stopped
    for now, close all applications that have open files on the disk...l"

    Then I'm given a long lists of 'System' and 'svchost' files that need
    to be closed before the disk can be stopped.

    I have several other smaller external drives which seem to only be
    active when I'm uploading or downloading files to them, which seems
    like a preferable option to me.
    Any suggestions on this?

    For a sensible answer I think you would need to list what the files
    were. In MS window you can see this with Sysinternals ProcessExplorer or
    maybe FileMon. Sorry, I can't remember exactly which tool in the
    Sysinternals suite of programs.

    In general, I have not found it difficult to shutdown USB attached HDD,
    but I have not been able to stop them from repeatedly spontaneously
    spinning up whilst attached. My use case was I wanted them permanently
    attached, but only waking up for daily/weekly backups and or very
    occasional on demand retrieval of archive files. I didn't figure it out,
    now I'm waiting for a spare WakeOnLan capable PC to become available.
    I'll turn the whole PC off when not using the disks. I expect this is a
    common use case, now we have cheap SSD storage, HDD are only used for
    backups.

    There are very long lists of System and svchost.exe files said to be
    stopping me from removing this drive. I can and have used the force
    option but I'm not sure how much potential damage might be caused by
    that. Do the type of system files I mentioned directly affect my
    personal workfiles as they move to and from the drive?


    svchost.exe is normally C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe it is not a file
    I would expect to see on a USB HDD, unless I was booting from it.

    However, I guess svchost.exe is a process name, and that this process
    has open files on the USB hdd. The svhost.exe is used to run windows
    services. In your set up a windows service might be configured to look
    at files on the USB HDD. To get any clue of what is going on you need to
    know the names of these actual files on the USB HDD. The problem is that
    there will be many svchost processes and it won't be obvious which one
    is causing the problem.

    If you don't have sysinternals (I think it was actually pocmon.exe noy filemon), MS windows Resource Monitor allows you to look at disk
    activity, files being used. I'm not sure if it covers locked files. I
    remember finding blocking files/process way more difficult than it
    should be.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Jaimie Vandenbergh@21:1/5 to mikehalmarack@gmail.com on Mon Nov 18 15:26:48 2024
    On 15 Nov 2024 at 09:51:47 GMT, "Mike Halmarack"
    <mikehalmarack@gmail.com> wrote:

    I try to stand it down, using a "USB Safely Remove" utility but in the
    case of this particular drive, I get the message: "Cannot be stopped
    for now, close all applications that have open files on the disk...l"

    Then I'm given a long lists of 'System' and 'svchost' files that need
    to be closed before the disk can be stopped.

    I have several other smaller external drives which seem to only be
    active when I'm uploading or downloading files to them, which seems
    like a preferable option to me.
    Any suggestions on this?

    svchost is just a wrapper for system services of all sorts. It's
    incredibly unuseful to know what's actually occurring. 'system' isn't
    really any better.

    But odds are high it's (a) an antivirus scan and/or (b) Windows search indexing.

    You can see the scan progress by looking in the AV's interface. You can
    exclude locations from Windows search indexing (don't ask me how, I've
    disabled it entirely as No Use At All).

    Either way, they'll just be reading files, not writing anything so you
    can still safely eject the bloody thing. As long as the drive is NTFS
    not some form of FAT format, I'd just yank it to be honest.

    Cheers - Jaimie

    --
    If you mean 'am I serious about what I do', the answer is yes.
    If you mean 'am I serious about how I do it', the answer is no.

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  • From Jaimie Vandenbergh@21:1/5 to mikehalmarack@gmail.com on Mon Nov 18 18:49:38 2024
    On 18 Nov 2024 at 17:39:54 GMT, "Mike Halmarack"
    <mikehalmarack@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 18 Nov 2024 15:26:48 GMT, Jaimie Vandenbergh
    <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

    On 15 Nov 2024 at 09:51:47 GMT, "Mike Halmarack"
    <mikehalmarack@gmail.com> wrote:

    I try to stand it down, using a "USB Safely Remove" utility but in the
    case of this particular drive, I get the message: "Cannot be stopped
    for now, close all applications that have open files on the disk...l"

    Then I'm given a long lists of 'System' and 'svchost' files that need
    to be closed before the disk can be stopped.

    I have several other smaller external drives which seem to only be
    active when I'm uploading or downloading files to them, which seems
    like a preferable option to me.
    Any suggestions on this?

    svchost is just a wrapper for system services of all sorts. It's
    incredibly unuseful to know what's actually occurring. 'system' isn't
    really any better.

    But odds are high it's (a) an antivirus scan and/or (b) Windows search
    indexing.

    You can see the scan progress by looking in the AV's interface. You can
    exclude locations from Windows search indexing (don't ask me how, I've
    disabled it entirely as No Use At All).

    Either way, they'll just be reading files, not writing anything so you
    can still safely eject the bloody thing. As long as the drive is NTFS
    not some form of FAT format, I'd just yank it to be honest.

    Cheers - Jaimie

    It takes a man of great knowlwge to come up with such a simple and
    effective solution.
    Just yank it I will. Thanks

    I've long given up on waiting for Windows to complete doing stupid
    things.

    Updates, yes. Too high odds of ending up with an unbootable system.
    Other stuff that's clearly nonsense? Get tae fuck.

    Cheers - Jaimie
    --
    "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted"
    -- Bertrand Russell

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