Make Windows see SSD as an external drive?

Question

So whenever I plug my Samsung 850 EVO into any computer with a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter, the PC recognizes it as an internal drive. This makes it impossible to just right click it and "Eject" when unplugging. Is there any way to make any Windows machine see it as an external drive so I feel safer just straight unplugging it without dismounting/ejecting?

Answer 1

I don't know an easy way to make it a removable media but here is another approach.

1. Right-click This PC / PC / My Computer and choose Manage, this opens up Computer Management.
2. Go to Device Manager.
3. Expand Disk drives and right-click on your Samsung SSD device (may appear as a model number instead of the drive name). Choose Properties.
4. Go to Policies tab. The idea here is to disable write-caching. For some devices the choice is be called Quick Removal and some are called Enable write-caching on this device. Just try to check or uncheck any settings related to write-caching to disable this feature.

By doing so you're telling Windows to use this device on-the-go. It enforces all file transfer to be done as soon as possible without Windows manipulating data (caching) to improve performance. If you see no file transfer window and the activity LED for this SSD is off, you can unplug it without issue, typically.

Answer 2

I think you should just get another proper SATA/USB adapter, especially when you want a "portable" solution.

My guess is your adapter does not expose itself as a USB (UAS) Mass Storage Device, but instead expose the SATA drive directly in some primitive way, so Windows does not consider it as a USB drive and hence does not apply the default USB removal policy (ExpectSurpriseRemoval) on it: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_apgc_hardware_developer_support_team/archive/2013/11/10/removal-policy-for-a-device.aspx

I have no idea how such an adapter exactly works though, since I've never owned one myself, and you haven't even given a screen cap of Device Manager.

Here are my USB drives:

where ASMT1051 is:
http://www.startech.com/HDD/Adapters/USB-3-SATA-adapter-cable-with-UASP~USB3S2SAT3CB
http://ark.intel.com/products/56604/Intel-SSD-X25-M-Series-80GB-2_5in-SATA-3Gbs-50nm-MLC

As a reference, you can also check the removal policy properties of an internal SATA drive. You will see them being set to 1 (ExpectNoRemoval), or 2 (ExpectOrderlyRemoval) if Hot Plug of that SATA port is enabled in BIOS/UEFI setting.

FWIW, Removable Medium Bit (RMB) returned in the SCSI Inquiry data (http://www.t10.org/drafts.htm#SPC_Family) does not matter on this. For example, among three of my drives, only Ultra Fit has RMB=1. Although if RMB=1 (for which the drive will be shown as "Removable" instead of "Basic" in Disk Management), you will additionally see an Eject when you right click on its drive letter in Windows Explorer. This is basically because Windows allow only one (the first) partition to be accessible for a "removable" (in the RMB sense) drive.

Answer 3

You are basically asking for the opposite of this question: How can I remove the option to eject SATA drives from the Windows 7 tray icon?

So try the opposite to the top answer there, either setting the TreatAsInternalPort value for the channel to 0, or possibly clear bit 2 of the Capabilities value for the SATA device (which may affect other drives too).