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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.
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...
Sometimes customer and software availability does not give you a choice. But you already knew that answer. Being opposed to Windows use for anything is fine, I am too, but your childish stance is harming the cause.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"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.
This essentially just shows that MS does not care about your data at all.
To the contrary, they are lowering performance to improve data safety.
A larger write will take time, and data will be corrupted if you just "yank it out".
Users yank it out anyway. This change will make it safer for them.
Since nobody uses thumb drives for high performance computing, this change is a sensible improvement.
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...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And how would the average user know? This is an unsafe default, plain ans simple. It is asking for people to get hurt. It is exceptionally bad design.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Autorun of has been disabled for many years on writable media like flash drives in windows, it only does it on read-only media like CD-ROM
I think the point is that writes are no longer cached, so copies and other writes will now take noticably longer, but when it's done it will actually be done.
I argue that this is how it should have been from day one, rather than the idiocy they had done up till now.
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?!
So did early macs. It was particularly fun if you only saw the message *after* you'd done passed the disc to a friend, who had, say, completely overwritten it.
Mac: please insert disc x.
User: but it no longer exists.
Mac (refusing to do anything else): please insert disc x.
User: I can't!
Mac (still refusing to do anything): please insert disc x.
User: Oh ffs... here's the disc, though you probably won't recognise it.
Mac (still stuck): please insert disc x.
User: Oh ffs *yanks cable*.
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.
Software is like sex. Make just one mistake and you've got to provide support for a lifetime.
Have gnu, will travel.
Windows 98 killed my pappy!
Stop complaining about how windows worked 15 years ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
well for example, EVERY cluster you write in a new file needs to mark that cluster as used, and that's a change in the free space map and the free cluster count, as well as the cluster list and directory's size indicator for the file. Obviously, updating it every time you write one more cluster would be grossly inefficient, so it's done in blocks, hopefully adjusted to the write speed of the device, so that most of these things are only updated maybe once a second. So if you yank a drive while it's saving a file, it may have written 150 clusters, but only 140 of them are accounted for, but hopefully it's accounted for EVERYWHERE. (since it can't update the cluster map, file size, etc etc all at the same time, you could easily pull it DURING one of those saves, and only get SOME of them done)
Journaled file systems try to cover for this by doing things in stages, where each stage is noted, performed, and completed, before moving to the next. If the device is pulled, and reattached later, it can see the "open transactions" and roll them back, so the file system is consistent again. (even if you do lose a little data)
I've seen older systems though that clearly have a long delay on updates. I'd save a file, and see it flash and flash and flash, and then go dark. and then like 5 seconds later, another little burst of flashing. I'm sadly assumign that was a final write operation, that if I had unplugged it when it stopped flashing, would have messed something up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
Gee, if only Windows would throw up a prompt if you pull the drive out during a copy. Maybe title it "Interrupted Actions", explain that the copy was interrupted because the drive was removed, and give the user options like Try Again, Skip, or cancel. And if you put the drive back and click Try Again, it would continue the copy.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
You should both see someone about your faulty memories: https://www.pcworld.com/articl...
That screenshot is from Windows 7. It's also the default on XP as well.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I yank mine constantly.
Don't we all. It just feels so good.
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?
Look be fair, just like that other user, I have also felt the impact of the questionable functioning of M$ write behind caching, where it pretends to write data to any media and well, any tiny hiccup and that data gets written all over the place or not at all or anything in between. The only safe way to run M$ write behind caching, turn it off, seriously. It just did not work that well or reliably and that is very problematic.
I found that windows machines run a whole lot more reliably when 'ALL' write behind caching is disabled, a bit slower but way more reliably. Touch wood, I have never had to reinstall the really old windows installation, the only time ever, every other version of windows reinstalled repeatedly. I think it was windows ME that had a bug fix for it's version of write behind caching, it didn't fucking fix it, it just disabled it, seriously that was the bug fix, to disable a feature they fucking advertised and still advertised it after the so called bug fix disabled it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Worst still they decided to use FAT as the filesystem, probably because that's what they had. FAT lacks journaling so a surprise disconnect can corrupt it easily.
Even with journalling, you can easily corrupt flash media, due to internal operations of the flash media firmware (wear levelling). Also, USB sticks are optimized for the particular preformatted FAT system. It's best not to change it.
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 ]
Better to phrase it "abort, retry, fail?" I think.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You missed April Fool's day by a week. Try to keep up.
I plugged a USB stick in, started a big file copy, pulled it out. Now had I said Abort, Retry Fail....
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.