What Is It?

A wonderfully simple utility that safely removes (ejects/unmounts) USB disks from a Windows system in the way that the MS Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” utility should but doesn’t.

Why Would You Want It?

Because the inbuilt Windows Safely Remove Hardware utility is a triumph of obscurity and poor design. Why? – I will tell you.

Left click on the Windows Safely Remove Hardware tool icon is the system tray and what do you see:

(click on any picture to enlarge where necessary)

Now unless you have previously assigned drive letters to particular USB drives and then can remember those assignments you have no idea which drive is which.

Or you can right click-

Then left click on the Safely Remove Hardware menu item

(Why – As it is the only item wouldn’t it be a triumph of the programme developers art to have it open the program window straight away?)

This shows the Safely Remove Hardware Window

Well this is even less helpful until you click on the “Display device components” checkbox

and now you get far more information, in fact enough to be confusing but not enough to easily work out which device is which!

Compare this with the USB Disk Ejector utility window:

Now this isn’t perfect (See What Could make this Better? at the end of this post) but it certainly is a lot less cluttered and far more informative.

Why Do I Want It?

I use several different USB drives often at the same time. These include portable drives, memory sticks and flash card readers. Trying to “Safely Remove” one of these often requires opening “My Computer” to help determine which drive is allocated to each drive letter before running the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” utility. Finally getting totally fed up with this process I searched for a tool that would do the job more efficiently and found USB Disk Ejector.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Lists the currently mounted USB drive devices.
• Allows these devices to be ejected (unmounted )

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

• Portable
• Very simple to use
• Command Line options
• Help file included

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Will not eject a portable drive with files in use
• No warning when trying to eject a portable drive with files in use

More About What it Does in Detail:

Go to Page 2 for details and screenshots

Go to Page 3 for ProReviewer Summary

Popularity: 25% [?]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Portable Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.