How many of you still use a flash drive? I know I don’t, but people close to me use them a lot to transfer media files from among computers. I stopped using external storage devices a couple of years ago in college because they were so susceptible to transferring malware from one PC to another, especially from college computers where every Tom, Dick and Harry plugged in and out their infected drives for one reason or another.
So, about those flash disks – do you recall back in the day how important it was to safely eject them? I remember it was one of the features a relative schooled me about more than a decade ago when I was playing around with his computer and 1 GB flashdisk (a rare thing at that time, even more thrilling because I knew of only one person with a laptop in an entire location).
Now, according to Microsoft, you do not need to do that anymore because the corporation included a ‘quick removal’ feature in Windows 10 version 1809 that ensures that you can unplug the drive from your PC without any precautionary measures. Just make sure you are not writing files or your computer is not reading files from it.
“Quick removal. 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,” reads a line in a Microsoft Support page.
Version 1809 was rolled out sometime in October 2018, so you may or may not be running it on your PC. The update is still hitting some PC across the globe.
At the same time, it should be noted that Microsoft has not gotten rid of the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media’ option for those who can never be too sure about the safety of their flash drives.
As I mentioned, while I rarely use external memory devices (I can’t even stand microSD cards on phone), I have not safely removed drives since Windows 7 because at that time, there was a rumour that Microsoft had incorporated features to safeguard storage sticks. I also did not like the extra clicks because they wasted my time, although I was never in a hurry. I’m putting this information out here for no reason at all, but I thought you should know because I know I’m not alone in this.
