Safely Remove USB Flash Drives Simply 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 fromor writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted dataor 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.
Do this:
1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then openDevice Manager. (Note: These steps are basedon Windows 7. Things might look different inprevious 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 alreadyselected, 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 .
Courtesy pcworld.com