I have several external hard-drives and I never turn them off or eject them when shutting the system down. The hard-drives are set to power down after a period of inactivity anyway and only take a couple of seconds to become available so I don't think there is a large power consumption issue. Gerhard --- MUGLO information at <http://www.freewebs.com/muglo> Manage your account options at <//www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi>