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PSA: It's totally ok to pull out your USB drive without "safely removing" them

By Kenny Yeo - on 9 Apr 2019, 10:35am

PSA: It's totally ok to pull out your USB drive without "safely removing" them

Microsoft has just confirmed that you can remove your USB drive without having to "safely remove" them anymore.

They confirmed this in a support guidance that as of Windows 10 version 1809, the default removal policy for external storage media has been set to "Quick removal." In earlier versions, it was "Better Performance."

According to the support article, "Quick removal" has the following effects:

 This policy manages storage operations in a manner that keeps the device ready to remove at any time. You can remove the device without using the Safely Remove Hardware process. However, to do this, Windows cannot cache disk write operations. This may degrade system performance.

Of course, you shouldn't just yank out the drive if the system is actively reading or writing to it. But any other time the drive is just sitting in your port doing nothing, you can feel free to pull it out.

But since "Quick removal" can degrade performance, users concerned with performance can, of course, choose to set the removal policy to "Better performance" mode.

To do so, you'll have to go to "Disk Management" and check the right option under "Policies." Detailed instructions, as well as Microsoft's official statement on USB drive removal, can be found in the link below.

Source: Microsoft

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