Everyone has at least one USB mass storage device these days. These are great for carrying your important files and portable programs with you everywhere. Some of the USB drives with massive capacities such as 1 TB or 2 TB are also good for keeping backups of your files.
When you are copying files to and from an external storage device such as a USB mass storage device or a USB external hard drive, you cannot pull it out from the USB port or the files will get corrupted. But for some USB flash drives (pen-drives or thumb-drives) it does not really matter if you detach them from your Windows PC in the middle of a file operation. And some of these USB devices, you cannot even remove without first shutting down the Windows PC.
The devices that you cannot attach or remove without first shutting down Windows are called non-hotplug devices. The devices that you can freely attach or detach to a USB port on your Windows PC without first shutting down the PC are hotplug ready devices.
So how do you find if you have a USB storage device that is hotplug ready? For this we can use to methods:
Method 1:
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog. Type devmgmt.msc and press Enter to open the Device Manager.
- In the device manager, find your USB storage devices (usually listed under Disk drives), right-click on the target device and then select Properties.
- In the device properties window, select the Details tab.
- Select the Removal Policy from the list of properties and check its value. If its value is 3, then your device is hotplug ready. If this value is 1 or 2 then your device is not hotplug ready.
Method 2:
The second method is very easy. We have to just download “USB WriteCache” tool from https://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html. As we launch this tool, it displays a list of all the USB drives attached to your PC and whether they are hotplug ready or not.
In addition to displaying the device hotplug property for a USB mass storage device, it also displays whether write cache is enabled for it or not.