Microsoft officially ensures that you don't have to 'safely remove' USB flash drives

After years (probably a decade) of politely requesting Windows users to ‘safely remove’ USB devices from PCs before unplugging them, Microsoft’s changing the way Windows interacts with USB drives. With the recently released Windows 10 build v1809, “Quick removal” will become the default USB setting, which means that you will no longer be at risk of losing any data if you just pull your pen drives or external hard drives out when you’re done using them. [caption id=“attachment_6415251” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] USB flash drive[/caption] As noted by ZDNet, Windows typically runs USB devices in something that it likes to call “Better performance” mode. This allows for write caching on an external drive, which improves performance when transferring data. However, if you do not “safely” eject the USB device by going into the taskbar and selecting the appropriate option, you run the risk of losing data when it’s removed. Quick Removal has always been an option if you choose to set it, but it’s not been the default one. That’s now changed, following the eventual rollout of the Windows 10 October update. Windows should update itself to the latest version automatically, but if you want to make sure you’re running Windows version 1809, search for Windows update in the Windows 10 search bar, select the appropriate result and manually trigger an update check if required. But there is one major trade-off to note here. With the shift to Quick Removal, the operating system loses the ability to cache disk write operations. What does this mean? Well, copying to an external flash drive might take longer. If you don’t like the new sudden shift or just feel like ‘safely removing’ your flash drive for old times sake, you can always revert to the old way of working. In fact, you can specify ‘quick removal’ or ‘better performance’ for every individual USB drive that you have. All you have to do is right-click on the Start button and go to Disk Management, right click on the USB drive, select Properties, Policies, and you will be able to change the removal policy for that specific USB device in this window.