Microsoft Said It: You Don’t Need To ‘Safely Remove’ Your USB Flash Drive Anymore

You’ve probably been that person who just pulled your poor USB stick out of the computer without minding the fact that every other ‘tech expert’ in your life told you that you have to ‘safely remove it’ first. Now Microsoft has officially confirmed you don’t need to worry about that anymore.

According to the company’s support guidance, as of Windows 10 version 1890, all the users benefit from a ‘quick removal’ feature that allows you to pull your drive anytime you so feel inclined (if you weren’t already doing it anyway).

“This policy manages storage operations in a manner that keeps the device ready to remove at any time. You can remove the device without using the Safely Remove Hardware process. However, to do this, Windows cannot cache disk write operations. This may degrade system performance,” Microsoft says in the document “The Safely Remove Hardware process protects the integrity of data on the device by making sure that all cached operations finish.”

This new feature keeps Windows from attempting to scan the device and fix any errors that might appear if you didn’t go through the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ process beforehand.

The company is just now notifying everyone that the update is rolling out, though it has been around since October last year, apparently.

If you still want to continue rebelling against the system, are not ready to live life by the new rules and you just liked that Safely Remove Hardware routine just a bit too much, you can change how Windows 10 deals with your USB devices.

All you have to do is plug them in, right click on Start and select Disk Management. From there on, right-click your drive, then Properties, then the Policies tab. From there, you can just switch back to the Better Performance option.

Of course, if you choose the Quck Removal route, if you’re still in the middle of writing files on your USB thumb drive, just yanking it out before the files have been saved is definitely still not advisable.