Windows 10: When you don’t need to “Safely Remove” a USB drive on Windows 10

Do you need to ‘safely remove’ or ‘eject’ a USB flash drive before unplugging it from your computer? It depends. If you use Windows 10 version 1903 or newer, Windows now automatically disables write caching for USB drives and you won’t find the ‘eject’ option because it’s no longer needed.

Last year, Microsoft introduced a new policy for Windows 10 that instructs the operating system to allow you to remove the device without using safely remove hardware or eject option.

The reason users are advised to use “eject” or “safely remove hardware” option is ‘write caching’.

When the write caching is on and you’ve stopped the data transfer, your USB device still caches some part of the data to complete at a later time. If you click on the ‘eject’ button, Windows will tell the USB drive to finish up and flush the data hanging out in the cache.

We all know that one person who will say that you should always, always safely remove or eject any kind of USB drive. But you do you always need to “eject” USB flash drives? On Windows 10 with version 1903 or newer, not usually.

By default, Windows 10 allows you to remove the device without using the eject process – as long as you don’t remove a drive while transferring data. If you do that, you’ll obviously corrupt that data regardless of the caching system, but that’s a no-brainer.

How to never use the “Safely Remove” option again on Windows 10


Windows comes with different policies you can select for USB storage devices. By default, Windows 10 is set to use the “quick removal” policy that ensures devices can be disconnected from your computer directly.

Another option is “Better performance” that improves performance but requires you to use the “Safely remove hardware” option.

Quick Removal could reduce the risk of data corruption if you like to pop USB drives out at your leisure. It does this by disabling write caching. By default, Windows uses Quick Removal, so you can remove your drives safely.

Since each storage device has its own specific policy setting, you can ensure that caching is disabled if you want to quickly remove your USB drive.



To do this, open the Disk Management tool and right-click on your USB drive, and select “Properties,” then open the “Hardware” tab, and open “Properties” again.

In the Properties tab, head to the “Policies” tab, and you’ll find two options — Quick removal and Better performance.



If you see that “Quick removal” is the default, you’re good to go and you can close the window. This ensures that caching is disabled and it’s safe to remove the drive.

But remember that this may degrade system performance. When you use the second policy, Windows can cache write operations to the external device and apps will work smoothly if they had already written the data.

With better performance (caching) enabled, it’s very likely that that data will be tied up with some background process on your PC. On that note, Microsoft recommends you to use the safely remove hardware option.

When it comes to smaller USB drives, you should always quick removal policy as long as you’ve let any transfers complete.

If you use external drives with a lot of data on it and performance is important for you, you may as well be safe and always eject it properly.

The post When you don’t need to “Safely Remove” a USB drive on Windows 10 appeared first on Windows Latest

Weiterlesen...

 

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.

 

USB Drives plugged in but No Safely Remove Icon in Tray, and

....no drives listed in Hardware List.

When I plug USB drives in, the Safely Remove Hardware icon does not appear in in system tray (its not hidden either)

First, I went to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Select which Icons Appear on the Taskbar...





.. and found it was already on

Next I tried using the solution in this post...

Solved No safely remove icon in tray any more after Windows 10 Anniversary up - Windows 10 Forums

...making a shortcut from "rundll32 shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll", but when I run the shortcut, there are no devices listed...





(in this screenshot, you can see two USB drives in the Explorer window in the BG but nothing listed in the panel. )

NOTE: They are listed in Disk Management and in the Device Manager under Disk Drives, and they function just fine..
I think the Safely Remove Hardware icon is not appearing because despite being detected and showing in Explorer, Device Manager and Disk Management, its not being listed in this panel for some reason.


NOTE2: I recently installed a new motherboard.

ASUS B150M-A
CPU Intel Core i5 - 6500 (3.2 GHz)
Mem 4096 MB (DDR4 - 2133)

I am 100% sure it was working before that, but I cannot say for sure if it was still working after that.
A friend suggested that it might be a setting in BIOS, but I have looked through it and nothing stands out.

Any suggestions would be welcome.


ETA: this is not the system listed in my System Specs page. That is another computer which I still have.

 

Safe removal of usb drive

Windows 10 has done away with the concept of safe removal like earlier versions of Windows. You need not follow any particular process unlike earlier.

Simply detach your USB drive. Forget about any steps to be followed.