Usb Safely Remove Hardware

When using USB removable devices like portable USB sticks or USB hard drives you need to ensure that the data you change on the drives is written to the drive completely.  Generally by default the properties for USB devices are set to write caching and when you want to remove the drive you need to use the 'Safely Remove Hardware' option to make sure all data is flushed to the drive.

Write caching essentially means that any changes you make are either kept in memory or hard disk virtual memory to be written to the drive at a later time.  Ideally data should be written to the device during idle time however that does not always occur.  The possible result of removing a device before data is synced is data corruption.

What you can do to avoid data loss and save time is set individual policies for your drives whether they're removable or fixed.  Here are the steps:

• Go to My Computer and right click on an drive and left click on properties
• Click on Hardware tab and select one of the USB drives for example
• Click on properties and then click on the policies tab

Now you should see a tab that looks something like this:

Now if you use a USB stick for quick transfers only you could select 'Optimize for quick removal' which will mean slower performance than caching.  If you use a hard drive that is semi-permanent you may want to select optimize for performance, ie, write caching is enabled.  The risk is if you have a power failure you could lose some data.

You can set these policies for each individual drive.  Fixed drive policies have a slightly different screen however you can still select or de-select write caching.