I do not want to eject the hard drives...

Not sure about the title, but basically I built a couple of PC's for photo editing. One thing I do not like is when I go to remove the memory card reader both internal hard drives are an option to remove as well. So, I have to carefully choose the correct drive to remove. I have no reason to remove the SDD (software) or internal 1TB (pics). How do I change this? I've never seen the option to remove the "C" drive, but this is the first custom pc I have ever used.

Using Windows 7

Thank you for any help.

There is no need to eject USB devices in windows 7.

Your carder should have an indicator light, as long as it shows the card is not being accessed, it is safe to just unplug it.

You have that option because they're likely SATA connected drives right?
SATA is hot swapable, it's the nature of the connection.

You always always want to safely eject any media before removing it from USB ports, firewire, SATA, etc as it correct shuts down any processes running from Windows to the drive and prevents data lose/corruption.

I'm with Moppie - I never ejected media from Windows 7 and I have never suffered any data loss or corruption.

I understand why it can be done but in my experience just pulling the card / pen drive out does not do any harm whatsoever.

Nightstalker wrote in post #14839023
I'm with Moppie - I never ejected media from Windows 7 and I have never suffered any data loss or corruption.

I understand why it can be done but in my experience just pulling the card / pen drive out does not do any harm whatsoever.

Windows defaults to support quick-removal for the memory card readers, so pending data gets written down immediately instead of staying buffered for a save at a later time. It makes writes to the cards a bit slower, but the advantage is that it's enough to wait until the blinking light ends - unless you use special programs that themselves keep data unsaved in memory. Problem is that that type of programs will most probably not hook the event chain in Windows, so "safe removal" would not manage to convince them to quickly save the data before the removal.

So in the end - just check the blinks.

By the way - there is a registry setting that controls if SATA drives should be removable or not. There needs to be a DisableRemovable = 1 in the registry. Alas, I don't know what the registry path to the SATA driver would be for your specific computer. But if you google a bit, you can probably find a utility program that will give you a checkbox or something to specify if the SATA drives should show up or not among safely removable hardware.