I don’t think I’ve done a safe USB eject in at least a decade.
After realizing that users don’t properly eject their USB drives, Microsoft has finally given up on asking everyone to “safely remove” their devices. Back in the day, Windows users were asked to properly eject their USB devices by clicking the button in the taskbar and waiting until the message “Safe to remove hardware” is seen on-screen. The tech company says that this is in order to avoid losing any sensitive data or even corrupting the device, in case it hasn’t finished saving everything yet.
With Microsoft’s new 1809 update though, Windows’ default setting for external devices such as USB and Thunderbolt has been changed. Past versions had “better performance” as the default setting. This setting enabled write caching on external devices, but users still had to click “Safely remove hardware” before ejecting the device to avoid possible data corruption. The new update, however, has changed this to “Quick removal”, which means users can now yank out their USB drives without worrying about their data getting corrupted.
While this may seem like good news, it does come with a possible downside. The new default setting may “degrade system performance” as it doesn’t allow write caching, according to Microsoft. If you’re a heavy user of portable drives and constantly need to move large or important files, it might be best to retain the “better performance” setting.
