I disagree with your default setting. I normally wait for the icon to disappear before pulling the unit out of the car.

However, in later versions, it seems to spend more time in the on position anyway... =)

Well, technically the only time you could do any "damage" to the drive is when the drive is actually doing reading (the bright icon), and even then, chances are you're not going to hurt it.

You don't have to wait for the icon to disappear to pull the unit out. When the icon is dim, it just means the drive is spun up, which is perfectly fine to power down and/or pull out the unit. When you shut your PC off, chances are the drives are still spinning at the current time... they spin all the time (unless you have power saving modes turned on and they power down after a certain amount of time)

Either way, I think the icon should be off as default... when this thing goes public, the masses aren't going to care if the hard drive is spun up or not... Hell, half of them probably won't even understand what a powerful machine they actually have at their disposal. :)

(O|||||O)