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USB Safely Remove allows to manage assigning of letters to hot-plug drives
and gives the following features:
If you have one or more network drives connected as well as you
actively use USB devices, Windows on its restart may mount a USB device
to the letter of a network drive or vice versa. In this case the network drive will be
unavailable or it can be mounted to another drive letter which is inconvenient,
when you have program shortcuts to this drive.
To tell USB Safely Remove what letters must not be assigned
to your hot-plug devices, enable "Prohibit to assign the following drive
letters to hot-plug devices" option at the "Drive letters" tab of the
program Options:
If you have several external drives, Windows may mount
the same drive to different letters on system restart. It might be unuseful,
especially if you setup data backup software for this drive. In this case it is
convenient to have these drives mounted as folders of your fixed NTFS drive and
disable assigning of the letters to the drives. For example you can mount all your
external drives to the folder of drive C: - C:\Externals. You can see benefits
of this solution from the figure below. In short, all your external drives
will have clear fixed names, as well as you can see which drives are
connected at the moment ("Backup Drive", "JetFlash 1 GB") and which not.
In order to mount a hot-plug drive as a folder:
- Enter to the device properties
- Switch to "Drive properties" tab
- At the left part of the dialog choose your required drive if there
are more than one drive
- Enable "Mount drive as a folder" option (see pos. 1) and specify
an empty NTFS folder where you want to connect the drive to (you can
choose a folder using "..." button).
Also you may fully detach the drive letter (see pos. 2).
- Press "OK" button to save settings
External drives can be mounted only to empty NTFS drive's folder!
You can change drive letter of a device or even disable it to hide device drive
in Explorer.
In order to change drive letter:
- Enter to the device properties
- Switch to "Drive properties" tab
- At the left part of the dialog choose your required drive if there
are more than one drive
- In the "Drive letter" dropdown list choose a needed drive letter.
"No" item means that a letter will be disabled for this drive,
and you will not see it in Explorer.
- Press "OK" button to save settings
Windows may assign different drive letters to a certain device, so you are
not sure what drive letter will have your flash drive on this connection.
Usually it's a bit annoying but do not prevent you working. The problem
will arise when you need to start non-portable applications from the flash
drive or you wish to ask a desktop application to store data to your external
drive. In this case the device must have a fixed drive letter that isn't
changed amongst different connections.
USB Safely Remove starting from version 4.2 resolves that problem. It allows
you to fix drive letter to a device. Just open your device properties,
switch "Drive properties" tab, choose required drive letter and check
"Fix drive letter". Starting from this moment your device will always stay
with this drive letter and no one of other devices will occupy this
letter even when your device is not connected.
Do you have a card reader with several slots? If you said "yes", you would
likely use only one memory card at a time, however your card reader
creates up to 4 drives in your system. It may be annoying because you are required
to spend more time finding the memory card drive among other "empty" card
reader drives.
In order to enable an option to hide empty card reader slots:
- Go to the program options (
 button in the stop menu)
- Switch to "Drive Letters" tab and enable option
"Hide drive letters when there are no media inserted" there
- Press "OK" to save settings
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