Windows 10: Problem with "Better performance" profile for USB drive?

I occasionally take backups to a portable external USB drive. This is a non-too-swift drive so I set the "Better performance" for the drive. Following completion of a backup the "Safely remove" process would often fail saying the drive was still in use. This condition would last anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours (at which point I would reboot). Process Explorer showed that files used by the backup were no longer allocated, but Windows still had some.





A search of the web indicated that this was related to write buffering, and sure enough, when I changed to the "Quick removal" profile, the problem went away. In other words, the "Safely remove" function would work fine when it was no longer needed.

I doubt I will notice any performance hit if I don't use write buffering, but I find this a little frustrating. Is this a bug, or is there something I'm supposed to do (other than use the "Safely remove" function) to get this to work?

The drive is an old Western Digital My Passport . Widows is using a generic driver for it and says the driver is up to date. There is also a "WD SES Device" (2 of them, actually, since I also have a permanently attached WD USB drive).The associated driver is dated 2015 and Windows says it's up to date. WD says Windows automatically installs the appropriate drives for WD newer than 2011 so I suspect thisd is not a driver problem.

I'm running Win 10 2004.

:)

 

Problem with "Better performance" profile for USB drive?

I occasionally take backups to a portable external USB drive. This is a non-too-swift drive so I set the "Better performance" for the drive. Following completion of a backup the "Safely remove" process would often fail saying the drive was still in use. This condition would last anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours (at which point I would reboot). Process Explorer showed that files used by the backup were no longer allocated, but Windows still had some.





A search of the web indicated that this was related to write buffering, and sure enough, when I changed to the "Quick removal" profile, the problem went away. In other words, the "Safely remove" function would work fine when it was no longer needed.

I doubt I will notice any performance hit if I don't use write buffering, but I find this a little frustrating. Is this a bug, or is there something I'm supposed to do (other than use the "Safely remove" function) to get this to work?

The drive is an old Western Digital My Passport . Widows is using a generic driver for it and says the driver is up to date. There is also a "WD SES Device" (2 of them, actually, since I also have a permanently attached WD USB drive).The associated driver is dated 2015 and Windows says it's up to date. WD says Windows automatically installs the appropriate drives for WD newer than 2011 so I suspect thisd is not a driver problem.

I'm running Win 10 2004.

 

Problem with "Better performance" profile for USB drive?

Thank you very much for your reply.

Examples include
Everything (by void tools)
Task manager running

I find USB Safely Remove very useful (not free) - and so do a couple of others I suggested it to recently.

 

help. USB drive isn't assigned a drive letter.

Any usb flash drive I plug into my computer isn't assigned a drive letter. The physical drive shows in the "safely remove hardware" but it doesnt show up in disk management. I have tried to populate the volume thru the safely remove hardware properties window and it does pop up in the list but it doesn't stay there. This isn't a format or assign a letter problem. It's more complicated then that. Maybe one of the services needed for usb drive management was disabled? Suggestions needed. btw external usb harddrives work fine.