Do I need to Safely Remove USB Flash Drives in Windows? A question that surely comes to your mind once in a while when you ejecting a USB flash drive from your PC. But do you really research what happens if you suddenly pull out a USB flash drives from your Windows PC. Well you must be thinking your USB drive or the data present inside it will corrupt because you some rumours.
What does Safe to Remove Hardware really mean in Windows?
To interact with external devices (like flash USB drives), Windows have two main policies i.e. Quick Removal and Better Performance. Well, Safe to Remove Hardware falls under Better Performance policy.
Let me explain you about these two policies in brief so that you better build your knowledge about the topic we discuss in this article.
Note that, Both of these two policies control how windows interact with data transfer and storage via external devices.
Quick Removal Policy
In this policy, Windows maintains the external device in a condition so that we can remove it whenever we want. When we transfer or store data to and from in between external device (like USB) and Windows PC, Windows perform an operation called cache disk write. In Quick Removal Policy Windows doesn’t perform this operation. Therefore, we find degrade in our PC performance to some extent.
What is Cache Disk Write Operation?
This operation improves the system performance by using RAM. RAM collects the WRITE command that it receive from the removable device like USB and cache it until the slower device like HDD writes it. Same scenario happens in case we write data to USB device from system’s HDD.
Better Performance Policy
Now coming to better performance policy as the name indicates this policy improves your system performance. If you ask why the answer is if your choose Better Performance Policy, then Windows perform Cache Disk write operation during Data Transfer and Storage.
With Windows October update 2018 i.e. version 1809, one can manually configure which policy to choose. In earlier versions of Windows, Microsoft has made Better Performance the default policy for removal of external storage media.
How to change the default removal policy of External Storage Media in Windows?
Note that you can change the default removal policy of external storage media in Windows for each one individually. This mean if you set Quick Removal policy for say USB A then this policy applies to this drive only and so on.
Now, to change the removal policy of your removable media, first connect it to your PC or Laptop.
Next, Right click on the start menu and click on file explorer.
Now, note down the letter or lable associated with the Device for which you want to change the policy.
Now, Again right click on start menu and open Disk Management.
Right click and select properties on the device for which you want to change the policy.
Once you open the properties, there you find the Policies section where you could change default policy for your respective removable media.
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