▷ Is it necessary to safely remove hardware in windows 10?

Many times when we try to choose the option to safely remove hardware, we encounter the problem that we cannot do it, the system notifying us that we can safely remove it or a message of similar magnitude. But is it really worth using this option on our Windows system? We will analyze in depth what this option consists of and if we really need to do it. (you will survive to tell about it)

Index of contents

How many times have we copied something to the pen drive and in a hurry, or simply because we forgot, we have taken the device or give the magnificent option located in our taskbar. Surely we all think: not even our system is so advanced, how come we still have to do this kind of thing.

Safely remove or not remove hardware

Well, to extract the hardware safely, today is practically nonsense, although other users think that it is strictly necessary to do so.

Surely many are used to carrying out this action, or doing it when they copy a large number of files inside a USB stick with fear of losing them if they do not extract the hardware safely.

And the truth is that in some cases we should do it, at least it is recommended to do it, especially in the beginning of these devices in which the data transfer protocols in them were not perfectly optimized, nor was the system.

Today this is perfectly overcome and we find a wide variety of devices, expensive and cheap so we will not have to do this. Of course, if we have a very bad pen drive, like the ones that BP gave a few years ago, surely even by removing it safely you will avoid losing all your files during the process.

Nowadays it is not strictly necessary to use this option, although we must bear in mind to carry out a small check before, to know if we should do it or not.

Check if I should safely remove hardware

Windows implements a directive in the properties of a USB device that will inform us if on this specific device, we must use the famous option or not. Let's see how to locate it and how to interpret it:

• With the device inserted in our computer, open the file explorer and click on " This computer ". Once inside, click on the USB drive with the right button and choose the " Properties " option. In the window that appears, which will be typical of hard drives, we must go to the " Hardware " tab and select our USB Drive from the list. Click on " Properties "

Now in the new window that appears, we will go to the " General " tab and click on " Change the configuration"

Again in another window that opens, we must go to the "Policies" tab and we will have already found what we are looking for.

USB Drive Policies

Here we will have two options:

• Quick extraction: with this option activated (by default) the system makes it very clear that the write cache option of the device and the system is deactivated, so we can safely extract the hardware without pressing the l icon. task bar. Better performance: in this case we will have the write cache activated so we will have to use the button to safely remove hardware.

Having the write cache enabled means that when we copy content to our USB drive, we are not actually physically copying all the content to the drive. To make the process faster, a space would be enabled either in RAM or on the hard disk in which the data will be copied to the unit, although we have seen that they are already copied.

This implies that perhaps at the time of extracting the device, not all the data is inside the unit and consequently we lose these or the unit is corrupted, being necessary to format it. Instead, sometimes nothing happens at all, because the system already has the files physically copied to the USB drive.

In any case, it is advisable to have the “Quick Extraction” option active to completely forget about the icon of our taskbar.

As you can see, the obligation to safely remove the hardware is in part, a myth that we have built ourselves. Although the root of the matter lies precisely in this directive that we have seen.

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Did you use this option on your team? write us what you are going to do from now on based on what we have told you and you have seen for yourself.