Could my hard drive be connected to USB?

Question

Hi everyone. Please help me with this question if you can. I bought a new PC a couple of days ago. The system unit was assembled by the seller using components of his choice (I don’t know much about PC). So I trusted him. Now the strange thing happened: there is an icon appearing on the lower right hand corner of my screen right next to the time display. The icon is the same as when I connect a USB flash stick to the PC. So I am thinking that this icon should not be appearing now since I don’t have any USB device connected to the PC now. When I hover my mouse above the icon it says “Safely Remove Hardware”, and when I left click the icon, it says “Safely remove Hitachi HDS721616PLA380 - Drives(F:, E:, D:, C:)”. And this is my hard drive, which I think should be an internal hard drive. The property tab says that its location is: Location 0 (Primary ATA Channel). But why is this icon appearing? Please help. Thank you everyone.

Answer 1

This is because your hard drive is SATA and SATA drives are hot swappable (you can plug them in while the system is running)so the system place the icon although you will never remove it.

Answer 2

Some SATA controllers (the part of the computer that controls data flow to the hard drive) allow you to easily hotswap drives. Hotswapping means you can disconnect or connect drives while the computer is still running. Controllers that allow hotswapping display that icon to allow windows to correctly clear buffers and finish data transfers before disconnecting. If this is your primary hard drive, then you should not attempt to tell windows to "safely remove hardware." On my motherboard, some of my SATA controllers do that, and some do not (because those use a different type of controller chip). So my guess is you have nothing to worry about. The fact that your properties says it is on the Primary ATA channel tells me that it is probably not any type of USB drive.

Answer 3

How comfortable are you with opening up the computer? The quickest way to see if you have a USB drive would be to check under the hood. It is possible to set a USB drive to be the boot device but I'm really not sure why anyone would do that in a standard system. I can think of a million reasons why someone may want to intentionally/occasionally boot from a USB memory stick or drive, but as an every day thing you take quite a performance hit on USB bus speeds. They are nowhere near those of SATA or even ATA.

Answer 4

specific, it could. Now i'm utilising an IDE complicated force linked to USB, yet you will possibly desire to a device is composed of a casing and an IDE complicated force interior, a potential supply out of your place electrical energy (your us of a a hundred and ten v), to 12 v in complicated force and a USB cable. Sorry i will't tell the place to purchase on your us of a (may well be pc areas broking), as a results of fact I stay in Indonesia, right here we actual locate at a working laptop or pc' shop