Microsoft Drops 'Safe Removal' of USB Drives As Default In Windows 10 1809 (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Since the arrival of USB drives, we have been warned that they need to be 'safely removed' using the correct method in Windows, rather than just being yanked out — but now this changes.

With Windows 10 1809, Microsoft is changing the default setting that's applied to USB drives and other removable media. The change means that the default policy applied to removable storage devices is Quick Removal rather than Better Performance — so you can now just pull it out without a second thought.

Comments

Re: Good luck with that

[ZorinLynx]

"Quick removal" means the OS will sync all data to disk BEFORE telling you the copy is complete. So if you wait until the OS says the data has been copied, you will be fine.

This is how floppy disks used to work. As soon as the copy completed the light would go out and you could eject the disk. It really should have been that way by default from the start with thumbdrives.

Re:Good luck with that

[Bert64]

AmigaOS had this feature, if you ejected a floppy that was in use it would tell you to put it back in and wait for you to do so...

I smell BS

[nctritech]

EVERY SINGLE WINDOWS since XP defaults to "Quick Removal" for ALL removable drives, including every iteration of Windows 10. I have yet to see a single computer running XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, or any build of 10 where I plug in an SD card, USB flash drive, or USB hard drive that did NOT automatically default to "Quick Removal." I have ALWAYS, as in 100% of cases, had to manually switch the performance setting through Device Manager. Anyone who says that the default policy is different is flying directly in the face of every single computer I've ever plugged a USB or memory card storage medium into over the past 17-18 years, and that's literally thousands of machines.

The only exception is when a drive is not the system drive but is connected to an internal potentially hot-swappable interface such as an AHCI SATA port. Those get set to "Better Performance" by default because they're almost always not in a removable tray nor connected by eSATA, even though they're technically hot-swappable. Of course, that's not what this Slashdot post is talking about at all, so again...WHAT IS THIS POST EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!

Re:I smell BS

[nctritech]

Microsoft is wrong. I know because I've been checking this out on every single machine I've touched since I found out it was even an option. The "Safely Remove Hardware" icon always appears even if the policy is "Quick Removal" but every single USB device or memory card ALWAYS gets assigned "Quick Removal" by default, without fail, every single time I've ever tried it on every single computer I've plugged something into, regardless of OS. These are not business computers running the same image, they're mostly home and small business machines from a wildly diverse set of OS install sources.

Re:Good luck with that

[vadim_t]

It's not really practical today.

AmigaOS could do that with floppies because back then the computer was 100% in charge of the drive and knew exactly what had gone through and what not.

A modern disk runs an entire OS of its own, and very possibly lies to the OS about its internal state, because lies look better on benchmarks. Just because the drive says "this has been saved", doesn't necessarily it has been.

That means the OS can't really do what you want reliably. It might work with some drives, and fail miserably with others.

If every hard disk was truthful about what's on the platter, and every SSD had the capacitors needed to finish work, this would work nicely. But we unfortunately don't have that.

Re: Good luck with that

[uncqual]

I find it easier to use the sysinternals command line tool handle rather than procexp for this use.

C:\Temp>handle /?

Nthandle v4.21 - Handle viewer
Copyright (C) 1997-2018 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

usage: handle [[-a [-l]] [-u] | [-c [-y]] | [-s]] [-p |] [name] [-nobanner]
    -a Dump all handle information.
    -l Just show pagefile-backed section handles.
    -c Closes the specified handle (interpreted as a hexadecimal number).
                          You must specify the process by its PID.
                          WARNING: Closing handles can cause application or system instability.
    -y Don't prompt for close handle confirmation.
    -s Print count of each type of handle open.
    -u Show the owning user name when searching for handles.
    -p Dump handles belonging to process (partial name accepted).
    name Search for handles to objects with (fragment accepted).
    -nobanner Do not display the startup banner and copyright message.

No arguments will dump all file references.

For example:

C:\Temp>handle VBoxSharedClipboard

Nthandle v4.21 - Handle viewer
Copyright (C) 1997-2018 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

VirtualBox.exe pid: 6088 type: File 50: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxSharedClipboard.dll
VirtualBox.exe pid: 8008 type: File 50: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxSharedClipboard.dll