It is always an extra safety precaution to notify the operating system on your server that you’ll be removing a drive. Newer operating systems (Windows 2003/2008, Vista, Windows 7) have improved on drive removablity and it has become less necessary to safely remove drives but many IT professionals still do. You also might want to check Drive caching to insure the operating system sees the drives as removable. For example in XP and 2003 In Device Manager, under properties for each Removable Hard Drive, select “Optimize for fast removal”. With this option selected, it is less necessary to click “Safely Remove Hardware.”. Having said all this, if Windows was still writing to the drives when you power them down, it can result in data loss and corrupted hard drives so it’s a good idea if your operation allow for it to notify the operating system you are removing the drive before operating the key. The HRDM2 software may help make this a one click operation.