Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
This essentially just shows that MS does not care about your data at all. A larger write will take time, and data will be corrupted if you just "yank it out". I think this is just another sign that MS has stopped to care about its users completely and this little piece of data-safety was just overlooked so far and is now gone as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Because nobody ever took the time to bother.
So we could have this feature all the time. But our data was corrupted every so often for no other reason than just because they can.
Finally this annoying stupid misfeature will go away. Now if they only could with the horrible fake scanning for "fixing errors" after you've used a USB stick on Linux...
Progress!
So I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that the bigger problem, that Windows by default automatically mounts and runs any USB media you shove into it, has gone unfixed.
You're trusting the hardware to not destroy critical flash areas in what is essentially a brown-out.
What's the default behavior when using an operating system like systemd? Can a mounted USB disk device be removed without first unmounting it?
Just pulling it out is not safe. Protect yourself.
We should stab the fucking cunts with torches and burn them with pitchforks!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
so you can now just pull it out without a second thought.
I get that the writer is trying to provide a simple description of the changes, but that is not good advice. Honestly? Just "No." If you yank your drive out in the middle of a write transaction, you're taking your chances. Not having the caching enabled just reduces the risk. Besides, wasn't the default for removable devices always "Quick Removal"? I could be misremembering, but I believe that's been the default setting when I've inspected a device for as long as a care to remember.
A smart programmer would cache the copy and even IF the use yanked the USB out, the program that I wrote would know to warn that the data isn't completely copied and if they stuck it back in, it would pick up where it left off and copy the rest. Today's DVD players do something similar when you yank a DVD in the middle of play.
That's what I/we did way back when. But hey, I'm just a programmer and not an "engineer" or a "scientist". So, ignore what I say about some stupid issue that was solved 30+ years ago.
My bad.
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?!
Is that something like syncing after every write and so reducing the lifetime of the device?
Bill got caught lying 12-25 times repeatedly stating "Blood plasma is sterile" and then later that "The Chinese Govt does not directly censor Chinese citizens" and other absolute bullshit head-in-ass retard-level lies. You're not trustworthy.
You are not a source of information that anyone should or even could trust, knowing your dishonest history. Sorry. That's what accountability means when you get caught lying repeatedly, over and over, even after directly corrected.
You're not shit but a liar, Bill.
standards should was what got me look at your soft, You don't need to real problems are inherently of OpenBSD versus Don't be a sling OF AMERICA) is the shit-fiiled, are just way over = 36400 FreeBSD been many, not the Itself backwards, to this. For watershed essay, person. Ask your
and manufacturers didn't want you to know that. These days they're fast enough it doesn't matter, so Microsoft can drop the charade.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Much tech stuff reflects long obsolete practices. Windows has depreciated 'lazy writes' for ages now. I/O is much faster, so are write speeds to storage devices. The need for 'lazy writes' has mostly vanished.
So USB sticks rarely had lazy writes anyway. And the 'eject' mechanism for external storage on windows has been 'broke' for many versions now- just that MS has been too lazy to get rid of the 'eject' nonsense on the desktop.
Like many users, I try to use 'eject' for 'safety' and the OS just doesn't respond properly- showing the code pathways are pretty much irrelevant.
The real pity is that the much trumpeted Windows/Intel method to use 'flash' memory (SSD) as cache between the HDD and RAM never took off, and instead SSD is simply used as an alternative to HDD. Third party apps exist to do this flash cache method, but are poorly supported by Windows to the degree that they are not worth using save for some specialist server work.
And now QLC flash chips have dropped the endurance of flash to laughable levels, I suppose the industry doesn't want flash used in situations where there will be a lot of writes anyway.
PS Win10 still has a ton of legacy nonsense on the Desktop that no longer reflects the working of a modern machine. But MS is still too busy pushing that UWP shit to polish what matters in their OS.
Ummmm
[($)]
Bill got caught lying 12-25 times repeatedly stating "Blood plasma is sterile" and then later that "The Chinese Govt does not directly censor Chinese citizens" and other absolute bullshit head-in-ass retard-level lies. You're not trustworthy.
You are not a source of information that anyone should or even could trust, knowing your dishonest history. Sorry. That's what accountability means when you get caught lying repeatedly, over and over, even after directly corrected.
You're definitely not shit but a liar, Bill.
that you even know about "Try again, Skip or Cancel?
I get this condition, especially after editing a large MS-Word file on a USB drive and exiting, that Windows never tells you it is OK to pull out the drive.
I am in a hurry, late for a meeting or to catch a ride home, and I never get the "Safe to Remove" message. So I end up having to do a Shut down on the computer to remove the drive when Windows has saved ev-er-y-thing it has cached, but wouldn't you know it, I have to wait for an Update to complete before Windows even shuts down.
This is when one wants to throw the computer out the window, but I never know if it is OK to yank the USB drive before doing this?
Whether it is safe to just yank your USB drive out at any random time, or equivalently, unexpectedly lose power, depends on whether the file system employs an accurate, reliable atomic commit, such that even if you pull the drive out in the middle of a DMA transfer, the data and metadata on the drive will always be consistent as at some recent point in time, even if incomplete.
You can rest assured that Microsoft has no such thing, but evidently that does not slow them down a bit.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If there is a RAM cache in the drive, then the computer may not even know that the data has not yet been committed to the disk. So It can't warn the user. And this is unlikely to change.
But this change is not to allow users to remove the disk, it is to make it less likely to cause problems. It means that the computer will make sure that, as far as it is aware, the information is written to disk before telling the user that it is done - by closing the explorer copy animations, or by signaling to running programs that the write is done so they can complete, by closing the program or the save dialog. With USB hard drives, they signal that it is done while much of the data is still in the O.S.'s cache, which is a good idea for fixed disk but not for removable ones. USB flash drives are already used in this way, this is extending this to USB hard disks.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The current default treats USB connected hard drives like internal drives, and assumes that they will be safely shut down before removal. This allows the computer to store data temporarily in the computers memory, allowing the programs to continue while it writes out the data in the background.
This change assumes that the drive could go away at any time, so makes sure that data is written to disk before the applications close or the animations disappear. But you can still get caught out if there is data in the devices internal RAM cache, and 'safe removal' will still be recommended.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
This change extends that behavior to USB connected hard drives.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The real problem is that Windows writes to drives all the time by default (updating metadata such as "last accessed"). I hate having to mess with the automount settings every time I need to do some data recovery, because otherwise Windows will trash everything in sight once it gains write access to any device, even if the filesystem is known to be unclean. I once plugged a Win10 formatted hard drive into a Win7 machine, and in an instant, every file was invisible because Win7 can't handle Win10 security descriptors correctly, and promptly updated the filesystem to lock out every file. It took me hours on a Win10 machine to fix the mess.
I doubt changing the "safe removal" policy will accomplish anything. Flushing buffers as quickly as possible doesn't help much if your philosophy revolves around constantly writing data all the time when it's unnecessary, thus, there's always something in the damn buffers!
The default policy for USB devices has been to disable write caching and set the "Quick Removal" policy since the days of Windows XP. MS even published a lengthy document about it in 2001 describing how drivers would need to override this behaviour.
This has remained the default policy through Windows XP's various service packs, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and I figured maybe they introduced a regression at some point recently so I decided to plug a whole lot of devices into my vanilla Windows 10 pro 1803 machine. All USB devices be they USB2.0 memory sticks, USB 3.0 HDDs, or USB3.2 external SSDs were set to "Quick Removal" with write caching disabled as the default option.
Someone at MS doesn't understand how their own OS works anymore.
Yes, I agree that these problems already had solution a lon....
Disk access failure.
Abort, Retry, Fail? _
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
when can we have the same on Linux,
no unmount needed, just have all file transfer operations only complete when the stick is safe to physically remove?
so you can now just pull it out without a second thought
The pull out method is not a valid form of data retention.
*Starts transfer of large file* *immediately yanks thumbdrive* "Microsoft said I could!"
They might be auto-syncing removable media at all times, but that doesn't mean all file access on the drives has ended. Keep people used to the "safe removal" procedure. It's best all-around.