MythTips : Hold External Hard Disk Vertically

  It’s just a guess. if people says that disconnecting your external hard drive without safely removing it first, the needle would drop on the still spinning hard disk and cause corruption.

Normally you would of course just did the ‘Safely Remove’ procedure first, but what if you can’t eject it?
The annoying ‘Generic Volume’ can’t eject problem. So of course you have to remove it by force, but if you’re scared of the reading needle scratching the disk, why not hold it vertically? The needle wouldn’t land down on the disk. Then again, it’s just my hunch, whether this is proven to work, I’ll leave it to your comments.