June 26th, 2019
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Why does Windows list my SSD system drive as removable?

This has probably happened to you. You right-click the Safely remove hardware and eject media icon, and among the removable devices is your primary hard drive! Surely you can’t eject your primary hard drive. Why is this on the list?

Because the device driver reported that the device was removable.

Explorer doesn’t try to second-guess the device driver. If the device driver says that the drive is removable, then it’s removable.

One of my colleagues reports that whenever he runs into this problem, he installs Intel Rapid Storage Technology, which includes the drivers that fix the problem.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

8 comments

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  • Flux

    How funny that I must experience this problem a few days after your write about it, on a system that has never had such a problem in the past. Of course, the disk in question is an ordinary HDD, not a SSD.
    And what I did? I replaced a faulty graphic card.

  • David Walker

    “You can unplug a hard-drive’s SATA connector, or plug in a new drive, and it will be recognized and immediately start working.”  Well, I doubt anything will be recognized if the drive you unplug is the system (or maybe the boot) drive.  I don’t think Windows would like that.  

  • Gunnar Dalsnes

    could it not have been a selection in windows itself? because the user know better than the driver ( how is the driver supposed to know about my workflow, what drives are external or not etc)

  • Jan RingoÅ¡

    I have two identical SATA adapters in my poor man’s NAS. One reports drives as removable, the other does not. I did not manage to figure out why. I stopped to bother but still I’m kinda nervous that I’ll click it unintentionally as the drives are in RAID5 (the software one in Windows Server) and take three weeks to resync.