You can now unplug USB devices without hitting Safely Remove Hardware

Most PC users get annoyed when they have to safely remove a USB drive from their system — me included.

Sometimes, we simply don’t care about losing data and we unplug USB drives without letting Windows about our intention.

However, experts have always been warning users about unexpected transfer termination issues as you might end up losing your data. Even if you disagree, there really is a genuine risk attached to it.

Microsoft also noticed that users don’t care about that risk. As a result, the tech giant finally decided to change Windows 10’s default USB settings.

New Windows 10 versions now feature the Better Performance option aimed at increasing data transfer speed. It does this by allowing Windows 10 to cache write operations to the external device. 

You can remove USB drives without safely removing them

The Safely Remove Hardware option actually protects your data by making sure Windows has finished all cached operations.

However, this option has been removed now and disk write operations are no longer cached by the system. This has been made possible by changing the default settings for USB drives so that users don’t need any mouse actions.

The quick removal feature has been implemented in the October 2018 Update (1809).

It will somehow reduce PC performance but it is still unclear to what extend. It won’t affect low data transfer speeds, but you might notice the change as far as the big data transfers are concerned. 

How to revert the changes for better performance

If you want to revert these changes, you can still enjoy better performance on your own USB drive. You can simply follow these steps:

1. Open Disk Management, select your USB drive and right click on it.
2. Go to Properties>>Hardware>>Properties, now switch to the Policies tab.
3. Here you can change the default removal settings for that particular USB drive.

This feature was initially rolled out as a part of October 2018 update last year. However, most of users had no idea it existed. That might be the reason why the Redmond giant has now decided to notify users about i on a large scale.

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