Sunday 12 July 2015

Hate Removing USB Drives Safely ?

  
" Life may be just too short to remove USB drives safely  :-) "

And the annoying seconds required to wait for it to eject, may not please the impatient. 
I too stand guilty of ripping apart my drive from the system.

But why does your system want you to wait before it releases your drive.?

A small concept of  'write caching' comes in here :

Rachel Z. Arndt explains what that means over at Popular Mechanics:

"For efficiency's sake, they don't actually write the files
you're moving to the disk until there are multiple files to
move. Ejecting the disk is a way of telling the computer
that it's time to do the writing, regardless of whether the
computer deems it efficient. When you remove a flash
drive without warning the computer first, it might not have
finished writing to the drive."

This means that pulling your external drive out without warning could result in the file you just saved being lost forever - even if you saved it hours ago.

So simply we do this to ensure that the OS isn't busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupt 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. 
Yup, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.


Check this out on your Windows: 
1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager through your Control Panel.  (FIG.1)
 (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look a bit different on other versions of Windows.)
FIG.1

2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it's called "SanDisk Cruzer USB Device" (FIG.2)
3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.     (FIG.2)
4. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like this: (FIG.2)
FIG.2

5. The first option Quick removal must be selected.. 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 we giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results found, almost nothing. The performance impact seemed negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it's worth it to allow us, to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.

THATS ALL. YOU ARE DONE !!!!!!

And now,  In case the "better performance" option on the policies tab, was what that impressed you,  then read on, else the above way was all you wanted..
So, after you select and OK the "better performance" option now, 
I suggest you Get a Shortcut.
Yeah, this might just save you some of your time and might as well be less annoying.
Easier than trying to click the tiny icon in the tray, at least…
Here you see how:
1). Right click on the desktop and Go to 
new -> shortcut  (FIG. 3)
2). In Create shortcut window, Type 
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll  
(FIG. 3)


FIG.3

3). Click Next

4). Assign a pretty name to your shortcut and Finish..

5). Done.

Now you can use this shortcut to remove USB drives or you can also assign a 'shortcut key' to it.
For assigning a shortcut key :
1). Right click on the shortcut icon.
2). Select properties.
3). In the properties window, click on shortcut tab .
4). Assign a shortcut key to it. Ctrl+Alt is by default. You just need to add an extra key to it.  For e.g. if you press R , then Ctrl+Alt+R, becomes your new short key for Removing your drive.


FIG.4

5) You can also customize your icon, through the "Change Icon.." button and assign an icon of your choice. FIG.4 shows the shortcut icon generated, here I called it "ejectSafe".

6). Now Click on Apply -->  OK.


Thats it, you are good to go...

No comments:

Post a Comment