USB Removal

[trachy]

Anyone know how keep the 'Unsafe Removal of Device' message from popping up when physically ejecting a USB device? I get it every time I yank out my pen drive, and I'm unwilling to use the stupid 'Unplug or Eject Hardware' dialog. For cryin' out loud - I know when it's safe to remove it! There's got to be a registry tweak of some kind that I haven't found yet.

- Drew

[David Prahl]

I've found that it's ALWAYS good to do what windows says (or at least 98)! I think we al find the stupid "eject device" song and dance annoying, but I've wiped out a thumb-drive by just pulling it out. Even when it was not being accessed! USB is a constant, bi-directional link, so it hates being disconnected.

I don't know of a way around the stupid thing. We have to do it every day at work because we use 60 GB USB drives for backups.

[Dave Beauvais]

In Windows 2000 and XP, you can enable a setting that allows you to just pull the thing out without the risk of corrupting or losing any data. With the USB drive plugged in, go to Device Manager, expand the "Disk drives" branch, and double-click the USB drive in question. On the "Policies" tab, you'll see two options: "Optimize for quick removal" and "Optimize for performance." The "quick removal" option will make sure that all data is written to the device immediately instead of to a cache and then the device. In this way, when the copy, move, whatever dialog goes away, Windows is done with the drive and you can just yank it out of the port.

Windows 98 has a similar option for removable devices, though I'm uncertain as to whether it applies to USB devices. I know it works with things like Zip Drives, so it may work with little USB drives, as well. To use this setting in Win98, go to System Properites (right-click My Computer and select properties, for example). Click the "Performance" tab and click the "File System..." button. Click the "Removable Disk" tab and make certain the "Enable write-behind caching..." option is NOT checked. Click OK or Close as many times as necessary. I'm sure Win98 will make you reboot after changing this. :roll:

Please note that disabling write caching may make file copy operations seem significantly slower. This is because instead of writing to a high-speed cache first and letting Windows finish the operation in the background while you work on other things, you have to wait for Windows to copy directly to the device. Try it and see how it works.

Hope that helps!

--Dave

[David Prahl]

Didn't work for me in Windows 2000! There was no "policies" tab, although "write to cache" WAS disabled.

Is it somewhere else? (tried the win98 thing, too). :?: