The days of worrying about safely ejecting your USB drives are no more. Microsoft has gone ahead and switched the default setting for USB drives work on Windows 10, allowing users to pull out the device without having to manually select the “Eject” button.
Before the October 2018 Update, USB drives were defaulted to operate with “better performance,” but now USB drives are automatically set to function with the “quick removal” setting, which allows you to safely remove the device without pressing anything in Windows 10.
However, now that USB drives are defaulted for “quick removal,” the system can no longer cache disk write operations, which results in slower performance. While it’s unclear how much performance you actually lose from this, you can revert the setting back to “better performance” on the specific USB device you’re using.
An easy way to change it is to go into Disk Management and right click on the drive you want to change. Click Properties, navigate to Hardware, click on Properties again, go to the Policies tab and from there you can then change the removal policy for that specific USB drive.
If you’re not on the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, then this new feature won’t affect you, so your USB drive will still be defaulted to the ‘better performance’ setting and there’s no way to change it.
