I have been using several sandisk cruzer micro USB drives for years with no problems. I always remove the autolaunch(U3) feature.
I recently purchased three sandisk ultra 16GB flash drives for use on different PCs, all running winXP sp3. The first time I plugged one in, I noticed that it automatically installed as a “local drive” rather than a “removable drive”. I have since read several posts on this topic, so I understand there is no fix to change these USB drives so they behave as “removable” type. I also read that once sandisk sells this questionable inventory, their new drives will hopefully be configured as the “removable” type once again. Got it.
On this first PC, the Safely Remove tray feature worked as expected, allowing me to safely remove the drive, but on a 2nd PC the drive is always reported as busy, even after shutting down every likely process, and closing every explorer window. Running a registry cleaner and rebooting failed to correct this behavior.
Should the “safely remove” feature work as it does for other USB drives, or is this ultra model different?
Is the “safely remove” feature still good practice on this generation of USB drive? (I have “optimize for quick removal” selected)
How can consumers identify the “removable type” versions when they appear on the shelves? Are they going to be named differently or clearly marked, or can you give us a range of serial#s or something?
You do realize MS support for this ends April 8 of next month, right?
Running a registry cleaner and rebooting failed to correct this behavior.
Obviously not a Registry problem. Some app is accessing the drive, it could be Windows Explorer or something less obvious. On my old XP system years ago that had a similar problem it turned out to be my Firewall app. Once I closed it I could remove the USB drive safely. Why my Firewall, which one would assume is more concerned with networking, had a connection to my USB drive I never knew but it was the app causing the problem.
3) How can consumers identify the “removable type” versions when they appear on the shelves? Are they going to be named differently or clearly marked, or can you give us a range of serial#s or something?
Unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction things are going. Sorry.
Well, after a 2nd reboot the safely remove feature is working normally with the Ultra drive. I didn’t have time to check the firewall, but that is good info for the future.
I had thought the whole local vs removable issue was fairly recent, but I see some posts I was reading go as far back as 2010, when you thought sandisk might abandon the ‘local’ drive designation and return to ‘removable’ type drives. I think I understand now that for sandisk the opposite is true, and the ‘local’ drive designation is the new standard?
Like many others, my preference would be to have this as a config option. I don’t often boot from USB but it just seems that the ‘removable’ type is more flexible.
One annoyance is that local drives show up with their own recycle bin and other clutter. Can I just delete all that or will it come back?
If it makes you feel better, 30% of the time when I hit safely remove my flash drive, it get a busy error. Best practice is to do this but you can get away with it if you’re really out of time. But you need to hit the eject button everytime as a best practice.
