Some live on the edge. Others are more cautious and before removing a pendrive from their computer, they take care - and in what way - to eject it so that nothing bad happens . These seconds are the ones that from now on will be able to live a little more relieved: because with the new Windows 10 update they will be able to extract the pendrive without ejecting it. Those who lived carefree, can continue to act as if nothing happened. Because now nothing will happen.
But, is it really dangerous to remove a USB from the computer abruptly, without first looking for the option to eject the device from the computer? The answer is yes. Although most of the time nothing happens, ruthlessly removing the pendrive can cause some data contained in it to be corrupted. And that, therefore, the stored information is lost.
The option that still offers us the possibility of safely removing the device today is the one that tells the computer that it has to empty the cache. And this for what? Well, to be 100% sure that no process is running and that there is no pending task that can be interrupted .
But, from now on you no longer need to eject your pendrive
The update for Windows 10 is already reaching users and brings, among other things, a new way to manage USB drives that are connected to the computer. As soon as you have version 1809 of Windows 10 installed on your computer, which should arrive shortly in the form of an update, you will be able to remove a USB pendrive or an external hard drive without taking the step of ejecting it previously.
And how has this change materialized? Microsoft explains it very well in the following way on its support page: USB drives that were connected to USB until now were managed through the Best Performance directive . This allowed them to have energy and have a write cache that served to write at a faster speed.
If for whatever reason you extracted it without ejecting it (at least until now) and the cache was being updated, the write data could be lost and the affected files, corrupted.
What about this new update? Well, Windows 10 works through what is called Quick Extraction. This implies that the drive is slightly slower, because it takes longer to write the data. In return, you have the option of extracting it without having to eject it first.
How to know if Quick Extraction is activated
We'll see. If the update has already reached your Windows 10 computer, in principle the quick extraction should have been activated. However, you can check it yourself, just in case. All you have to do is connect a USB stick to the computer and right after, access the Windows search engine and type: Create and format hard disk partitions .
Next, open the Disk Manager. When you find the name of your pendrive, click with the right button on it and select the Properties option. Access the Policies tab and check if, indeed, the option indicated by default is Quick Extraction.
If you prefer the drive to write faster, you will have to change this option to select another, which is Better performance. In this case you will achieve superior performance, but as you have done so far (and if not, you should) it will be necessary that before removing the USB flash drive you give the option to eject the device . Otherwise, you could spoil your files.