TR Forums

My case has a SATA drive slot that I use for attaching bare drives to the system for diagnostics. I don't know when Windows 10 decided to change this, but SATA drives are no longer shown when I right or left click the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" icon in the notification area. This has always shown every drive in my system before, even my internal drives. Now, it only shows USB drives (if any) and a button to "Open Devices and Printers".

Has anyone else ever run into this?

I'm in Windows 10 Pro. The only software I use that may have any effect on drives is Hard Disk Sentinel, which does not start with Windows.

As a temporary fix, is there some other hidden way to eject SATA drives in Windows 10? There doesn't appear to be anything in Device Manager, Devices and Printers or "This PC". Google searches have lots of people asking the opposite question "Why do my internal drives show?! I don't want to eject my HDD while its running Windows! HALP!", but I have yet to find anything about this sudden change. I'm guessing a lovely recent update caused this.

EDIT: Just remembered, I did install the Intel RST package a while back, so I don't know if that's related. I just read this:
http://www.overclock.net/t/974023/fix-a ... t_14900523

I wonder if there's a way to get the RST driver to show this channel as removable?

It would only have shown your internal drives before if it thought they were removable. Apparently it has now decided that they are all non-removable.

IIRC there was a way to change this in older versions of Windows, but I don't recall how.

Is hot-plug enabled in the BIOS? Is it even a thing? It shows on my Gigabyte and MSI UEFIs but those systems are Skylake and Ryzen.

just brew it! wrote:

It would only have shown your internal drives before if it thought they were removable. Apparently it has now decided that they are all non-removable.

IIRC there was a way to change this in older versions of Windows, but I don't recall how.

Windows 10 has always shown all of my drives there until installing the RST driver.

Apparently this is common. I'll have to try a few of these methods to see what works for me:
http://www.overclock.net/t/974023/fix-a ... e-hardware

I just tried a program called HotSwap and it works but I don't really need another icon to do this.

Ahh, OK. So the RST driver is reporting them as non-removable.

Does this help? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... able-media

I've seen this in virtual machines where the SAS/SATA controller is set to LSI. Windows thinks the drives are SCSI(SAS) drives and offers the removable option. I have not had regular SATA drives, appear in that menu for years...

Good riddance, in my opinion. Use Disk Management instead to offline the drive.

MOSFET wrote:

I've seen this in virtual machines where the SAS/SATA controller is set to LSI. Windows thinks the drives are SCSI(SAS) drives and offers the removable option. I have not had regular SATA drives, appear in that menu for years...

Used to be an issue with Nvidia chipsets in the Socket A days, IIRC.

Topinio wrote:

Does this help? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... able-media

I'll look into it, but I think the RST driver uses a different registry entry than the Microsoft storage one. I'm still trying to sort out which registry key to use, since it seems to have changed a few times over the years and Intel apparently leaves bits and pieces of old registry entries in later versions so I have a few different (yet very similar) keys to use.

Anyway, it never hurt anything having the internal drives listed before. I've never accidentally clicked them and if I did it wouldn't do anything anyway. I have had this case with a SATA dock for more than 8 years though, so I've been using the "safely remove" dialog for drives this way for quite some time.

I guess I'm most surprised that we aren't given the ability to say which SATA channels have removable drives without messing with the registry. If not in Windows then in the RST configuration program. The "hot plug" ability of SATA has never been perfect, but it has always been an advertised feature, and yet we aren't given the ability tell the OS or driver which devices to allow this ability on. The BIOS does it, but the OS seems to either be all or nothing unless the user digs into the registry and adds keys that they've learned about on message boards. Not very intuitive.

I generally only see internal drives come up as removable when the SATA controller is using completely generic base windows drivers. Once you've installed the proper drivers, it'll generally recognize them as non-removable, unless (as mentioned by Funk) your BIOS has the ability to mark certain SATA ports as "hot-swappable" (or similar terminology).

As MOFSET mentioned, you can also do the same thing from Disk Management under Admin Tools, though it's several more steps than just right-clicking a taskbar icon.

The Egg wrote:

I generally only see internal drives come up as removable when the SATA controller is using completely generic base windows drivers. Once you've installed the proper drivers, it'll generally recognize them as non-removable, unless (as mentioned by Funk) your BIOS has the ability to mark certain SATA ports as "hot-swappable" (or similar terminology).

As MOFSET mentioned, you can also do the same thing from Disk Management under Admin Tools, though it's several more steps than just right-clicking a taskbar icon.

My BIOS does allow me to set them as hot pluggable, which is the default. The RST driver doesn't seem to acknowledge this BIOS setting though.

Used to be that drives designated as removable would have write caching automatically disabled at some performance loss. No idea how Win10 handles that feature, or if it makes any difference these days.