torange.bizFor anyone who grew up in the late nineties/early noughties, you’ll no doubt remember the whole ‘safely remove your USB’ saga.
Throughout school, you couldn’t even turn on a computer without your teacher or resident IT expert telling you how vital it was to eject a flash drive before removing it.
And don’t even get me started on the panic that ensued if you ever accidentally removed the USB or shut your computer down without ejecting it first; although that was unlikely to ever happen because you’d had the fear of God put in you beforehand.
PixabayThose days are now officially over though, as Microsoft themselves have confirmed you really don’t need to safely remove your hardware anymore. Hallelujah!
Admittedly, most of us probably stopped doing it as soon as we left school because we didn’t have anyone constantly reminding us, but hey ho.
The technology giant have confirmed once and for all it’s no longer a thing we need to worry about, introducing a new feature in Windows 10 called ‘quick removal’ that allows you to remove a USB at any time.
As long as you’re not actively writing files to it, the drive can be quickly and effectively pulled out of your computer without having to worry about losing important files.
PAAs per Microsoft’s own support guidance, this new ‘quick removal’ policy has replaced their previous default setting, ‘better performance,’ in which you had to safely remove the hardware to prevent you from losing any data.
Their guidance states:
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.
According to The Verge, this came into effect in October when version 1809 of Windows 10 first began rolling out. So some of you may already know this.
If you didn’t though, then let me bless your Tuesday with the knowledge that never again do you have to be haunted by the ‘safely eject’ icon again. Because I’m sure that’s all you’ve been thinking about for the past 10 years…
PexelsSo, there you have it. The days of descending into a major panic after accidentally yanking your USB out of the computer are officially over.
Happy days.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).