Surely more than once you have been scared to eject a USB incorrectly and have rechecked it to check if any file has been damaged or removed. If this happened, even if you do not believe it, your device can be destroyed.

The option to ” safely remove hardware ” is a crucial step when disconnecting a USB, micro SD, hard drive or memory card from a computer, but it will depend directly on your configuration and if required.

To check if it is necessary to perform this action, you must do the following:

Connect your device to the computer
Go to the Start menu and enter “My Computer” or “This computer.”
Find the name of your device, right click and access Properties.
In that menu, look for the Hardware tab and in it, Properties again.
In this section, open the Policies tab.
There you will see various extraction options: the quick extraction policy or configuration for maximum performance.
If you choose the first option, there will be no problem when removing the device without “removing hardware safely”. Otherwise, if your device is configured for the second option, you should always use the safe way of expulsion, to take care of your data.

What happens if I remove my USB without the security option?

If your device was connected to your computer, you might only cancel an operation in process, such as when you are copying files, such as photos, videos or documents.

In many cases, only actions are interrupted, but in the worst case, your unit could lose the stored data or be corrupted, to the point that no formatting could reconfigure it.

It should be noted that if you quickly insert and remove a device, the USB port may also stop responding to other hardware, due to a timing problem that prevents the PC from detecting a device.