Windows 10 now lets you pull out your stick without spooging data everywhere

Chris Merriman
@ChrisTheDJ
08 April 2019

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IF THERE'S one warning message likely to get the backs up of the computing community*, it's likely that one that telling off you get when you pull a USB stick out without asking.

The practice of 'safely removing' USB sticks dates back to an era when there was a genuine risk of losing data by failing to warn Windows that you're about to force an unexpected transfer termination.

However, Microsoft has realised that nobody pays a blind bit of notice to this, and so has decided to change the default settings to reflect this.

Previously, devices were optimised for the best performance possible. That did slightly raise the risk, even today, that you could end up with borkage, and at the very least would more than likely force a disk-check the next time you used that particular bit of kit.

However, starting with the dreaded October 2018 Update (1809) Microsoft has changed the default for USB drives to allow them to be fast-removed safely without any mouse-clicks first.

The downside to this is that, because Windows now constantly caches in order to ensure there's no data loss, there could be some degradation in performance of the drive - probably imperceptible, but for big transfers, it could feel a bit sluggish.

If you're the sort of person that wouldn't dream of not clicking the "safely remove hardware" option before you yank, you can switch back to the "Better Performance option in the right-click menu of the drive in question. You can also do a blanket override in the Disk Management tool built into Windows.

There might be some surprise that, despite this coming into effect during the last update, Microsoft has only decided to mention it now. The reason is pretty obvious though.

Given the endless issues that Microsoft had with Windows 1809, many of which involved customer data loss, Microsoft will have been looking to be as damn sure as sure gets that it could confidently say it works.

With 1809 (finally) declared fit for mass deployment in enterprises, the last step to being "finished", then Redmond obviously thinks its time to put a bit of faith in its withdrawal methods. µ

*second only to 'It looks like you're writing a letter, can I help?'