How to safely remove USB drives just by unplugging them?

Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.

Why is that necessary?  In theory, it's to ensure that Windows isn't busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive. As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn't know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.

Know How...!!!

1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.)

2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it's called "USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device."

3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.

4. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like this:

5. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you're good to go. As noted in its description, "you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon." If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.

So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it's worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.

Note: The Windows dialog shown above is misleading. If you unplug your USB device while data is being written to it – for example, while you’re moving files to it or while you’re saving a file to it – this can result in data corruption. No matter which option you use, you should ensure that your USB device isn’t in-use before unplugging it – some USB sticks may have lights on them that blink while they’re being used. Ensure you have no data being written while unplugging the USB.

What if you are not satisfied with quick removal, but want Safely remove option without taking much time?

Create a Shortcut icon on the desktop for safely remove hardware option.Here's how you can do it...

1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut:

2. Then paste in the following into the location box:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

3. Give it a name, and you’ll have a shortcut icon…

Click on the shortcut and...that will pull up the Safely Remove Hardware dialog.

You can assign a  hotkey for it too:

This is how...

1. You can right-click the icon and open the properties dialog, then go to the Shortcut tab.

2. Add in the shortcut key and close the dialog. 

As long as the shortcut is on your desktop you shouldn’t have to restart anything for the hotkey to work. You can also move the shortcut to another folder, for instance your quick launch bar.

Try it out...It saves a lot of time.Never say : "Safely remove hardware?Ain't nobody got time for that..." 

Have a nice day :)