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I have never used a computer where pressing the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media"-button has resulted in an immediate response. Most other functions responds almost immediate, whereas it almost always takes a few seconds for the "Eject USB Product String" window to appear. (I'll admit, sometimes it happens fast, but that's very rarely, even on new computers.)

Is there a reason why this should be slower than other commands? Is it due to the time it takes the computer to figure out what can be removed?

enter image description here

Stewie Griffin
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3 Answers3

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That’s because Windows, to improve performance, uses a technique called "deferred writes" wherein Windows doesn’t always immediately write everything to your external drive each time you use it. Rather, it consolidates lots of small writes into one big write by holding the data in memory.

It’s just like washing the dishes; it’s far more efficient to do one dishwasher load per day than do a load each time you use a single cup or plate.

But the downside is that some of the data you think you transferred to your USB drive may actually still be in your computer’s memory. That’s why you shouldn’t just pull the drive out but first use the Safely Remove Hardware icon to force Windows to write to the drive anything it is holding in memory.

That’s easy enough to say, but the Windows "Safely Remove Hardware" feature is confusing to use, particularly if you have several USB devices. Worse still, the icon often goes missing from the system tray.

For Faster remove you can change your USB disk Setting to protect Mode. but in this mode transfer is slower.

But other way is using "usb-disk-ejector" this Software is Free and portable. fast and safe.

Milad Abooali
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Everytime you hit that icon to "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media", it triggers the same process (in background) as opening Devices & Printers.

A relatively bigger no. of connected virtual and/or network printers and other devices may cause it to work slower.

If you could bear an extra icon in your taskbar, here's a work around (might be little annoying to keep) -

Go to Control Panel -> View devices and printers. Whatever time it takes to open is its one time thing. If you could keep this window minimized (maybe to the very left) on the taskbar, it can save time while trying to eject devices.

enter image description here

Going forward, whenever you connect a device, OS would update this window (devices and printers) in background and would keep it synced. And when you click this icon enter image description here it's gonna work faster.

Alternatively, since you have that Devices and printers window opened already (though minimized), you can restore it, click on the device and choose to eject. (two ways as in below image).

enter image description here

Good luck.

d-coder
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The fastest way to eject a thumb drive is to open "computer" from the start menu (or create a desktop shortcut to "computer"), right click on the drive's icon (not it's name) and click on eject from the pull down. This works with windows 7 but I haven't tried it in anything else. You still get the "safe to remove" dialogue.

This option doesn't show up for an external hard drive but works with the optical drive.

I don't know how this jives with delayed write, but it's almost instant.

james p
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