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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Changes for Disconnecting USB Storage Devices in Windows 10

April 9, 2019

Up until now, you should be selecting to safely eject USB storage devices from your Windows 10 system. That is changing with Windows 10 version 1809. The default policy for removal of USB storage devices was the “Better performance” setting. The default setting is now “Quick removal” with the release of version 1809. The change is significant. The “Better performance” settings means caching data while it's being transferred, opened, or in preparation for certain operations. It also means that you had to go through the “safely remove hardware” to manually eject a USB flash drive.

The “Quick removal” setting means that data transfers may take a little longer, but you’ll be able to yank the flash drive out instead of going through the manually eject process. You can manually override the default operation by using the following steps.

  1. Connect the device to the computer.
  2. Right-click Start, and then select File Explorer.
  3. In File Explorer, identify the letter or label that is associated with the device.
  4. Right-click Start, and then select Disk Management.
  5. In the lower section of the Disk Management window, right-click the label of the device, and then click Properties.
  6. Select Policies, and then select the policy you want to use.

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