Can't Disconnect External Drive

Why is it that so many Western Digital products suck at what they do? Every time I tried using a storage device by WD it's been acting up. One time a drive wasn't even being detected by a computer (or other computers I've tried it on) and now this new 1 TB external drive is not wanting to disconnect safely from my laptop. I did a ton of searching online and apparently, despite it not actually saving anything it's still running processes as if the person who made it assumed you don't ever want to disconnect it from your computer (which is stupid for the fact one shuts off his computer eventually at one poine) and instead want to constantly back up weekly. I made one backup and that's all I want to do at the moment. I also want to shut off my computer, but if I do that while I still get the error message "can't disconnect external drive since it's still in use", wouldn't shutting the computer down then be equivalent to unplugging the drive before it's "safe" to remove? I literally waited a full day to get my 350 GB info on this drive, and I don't want it to get corrupted through unplugging or even shutting down the computer when the drive is "still in use".By the way, it says it's "in use" but I am NOT seeing it download or backup anything (because I already finished this hours ago). Could it be that it's saving something that I'm not aware of? Or is it simply "connected" to my computer and that is one of WD's definitions of "currently in use"? If the latter is true, I guess logging off/shutting down won't do anything then, but I'd still like to be sure.