Removeable external drive treated as "Fixed" by Windows

I use a Seagate Expansion+ USB external drive (1TB) to backup my data and library drives. Back on my old Windows 10 desktop, the drive would go inactive once I finished using it for the backup, and the disk activity light would go off, and Safely Remove Hardware would function OK. Now I have a Windows 11 machine (24H2, 26100.4946) and the drive goes active immediately upon plugging it in, and stays active once the backup is complete. Safely Remove Hardware no longer can shut down the drive.

I know that with Disk Write Caching disabled the drive should be safe to disconnect when I am done using it, but it is a little unnerving to have the activity light on while unplugging my main backup device for hundreds of GB of data, relying on Windows to keep its promises...

Also, in researching the problem, I find that Windows 11 considers my USB External drive to be a "Fixed" drive according to multiple tests, shown below. F: and G: are the two logical partitions on the external drive.



I guess I now know why Safely Remove fails. Does anyone else have an external drive get "possessed" this way?

Puzzled

Quite a few posts about safely removing hardware lately and a few about externals being recognised as fixed.

Change the policy?

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Re the external vs fixed: I think this has been happening previous to the below mentioned KB updates.

Windows 11 24H2 is misidentifying some USB-connected SSDs as fixed drives instead of removable. This started after KB5063878 and affects certain Phison-based or DRAM-less models. It can cause issues with drive ejection, caching policies, and some backup tools.

And to add: Apparently Windows 11 24H2 cumulative update KB5063878 (and preview KB5062660) introduced a storage regression that affects how certain SSDs behave under load. It’s not just a cosmetic mislabel—it can cause drives to vanish mid-transfer, corrupt data, and in rare cases, become unrecoverable.

Happens during large, sustained sequential writes (e.g. Steam installs, archive extraction, media copying)
Affected drives disappear from File Explorer, Device Manager, Disk Management, and SMART tools
Some drives reappear after reboot; others stay invisible or corrupted
Telemetry unreadable post-failure—SMART data may be blank or error-filled

USB-connected SSDs, especially DRAM-less or HMB-reliant models
NVMe drives using Phison controllers (common in budget SSDs)
Some external HDDs also impacted

Phison has acknowledged the issue and is investigating affected controller families
Microsoft is aware but hasn’t released a technical breakdown yet—community telemetry is driving analysis

Sinto,

Thanks for the info - I do have the policy set to disable write caching/Quick Removal.

Worrisome news about the drive problems in recent Windows updates - my boot device is a Phison 512GB NVMe, but it is using Intel's Arrow Lake-S/HX Volume Management Device as controller, per HWiNFO. Maybe those problems are part of why Dell decided to use the VMD along with RAID enabled rather than use the Phison controller.

I just hope it all keeps working...

Possibly avoid large writes to the drivers?
I’ve decided after looking into this a little more that I’ll be stopping FreeFileSync from real time backups, because it writes a lot all day. I may even stop Hasleo image backups.

I know there has been discussion about all this in forum, as well as in the update threads in Windows News

mta3006 said:

I do have the policy set to disable write caching/Quick Removal.

Click to expand...

Yeah sorry I missed that, derp. I miss a lot these days.