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I have a NAS drive and suffered a file corruption issue over wireless. I discovered that the drive is not set as removable so if the connection is interrupted while you're using an application to access files on the drive, you can get corrupted files.

I've tried the drive properties and other basic Windows controls and no joy - the options to disable write caching are grayed out. This is apparently a hardware-side flag that's set by the maker, which to me is incredibly naive / irresponsible for a home storage device. A home NAS device plugged into a wireless router needs maximum fault tolerance, not zero fault tolerance.

Is there any way anyone knows of to get Windows 7 to treat the network drive as removable? I'm looking for registry hacks, third-party tools and/or other ways to break the rules without breaking any laws. Thanks for any help!

Update per first response - it's an IOCell NDAS device. It uses its own network driver apparently created from IPX/SPX, so it does not require an IP address. I'm pretty sure that this is a common problem with NAS devices based on my research to date though :\

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  • First, what an excellent question, but you may want to include the make/model of the NAS in question.
    – Dave
    Aug 5, 2013 at 12:09
  • Do you mean NAS Drives as in the actual Hard Drives within the NAS Storage unit, or the NAS Storage unit as a whole?
    – Ben Franchuk
    Aug 8, 2013 at 0:33
  • "Removable drives" only apply to local attached drives, such as USB-sticks, memory cards in card readers, external hard drives etc. IPX/SPX? Really? How very odd. Surely it must support TCP/IP? Use that and disable IPX/SPX. It's also, as far as I'm aware, my fault tolerant than IPX/SPX.
    – abstrask
    Aug 8, 2013 at 21:56
  • I don't think that's specific to all NAS drives. My Synology shows as removable. According to IOCell's support FAQ, their NDAS (a bit different than a regular NAS) drive is intended to look and act like an internal drive. In a question about hibernation being disallowed in their driver, they respond: "By default, the suspend/sleep mode on windows PC’s is disabled when NETDISK connection software is installed. This is done because the computer treats the NETDISK drive as an internal disk..." (iocellnetworks.com/support-main)
    – leanne
    Aug 20, 2013 at 15:10
  • Sorry to say that, but looks like these devices are total crap. Looking at their FAQ, they have things like "Sudden unreadable NETDISK drive. Windows asks if I want to format the drive! What happened?" or "The Recycle Bin on the NETDISK Drive is corrupted.". Inventing your own proprietary storage protocol is HARD and probably a bad idea.
    – Jakob
    Aug 24, 2013 at 17:27

1 Answer 1

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Without knowing more about the NAS device and the driver I only have one idea that you can try.

Please try to enable the "Quick removal" feature for your network drive.

Click Start
Right click on Computer » Manage » Device Manager
Find your Network Drive in Disk drivers on the right side
Right click on it,
then select Properties » Policies panel
Make sure that Quick removal (default) is selected.

The Quick removal option being enabled for a device should make it write the cache immediately and in the event of a removal may make it more resilient. This may not enable the ability to disconnect the drive if the driver does not support removal but at least the caching should be honored from the OS.

I hope this helps and please let us know the outcome.

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