Cautious Windows users always "safely remove" their USB from their machine using the "Eject Media" option from the taskbar. Microsoft has now clarified that even though this was recommended in older versions of the operating system, this is no longer a requirement in newer versions starting from Windows 10 version 1809, thanks to some new configurations.

On a new support page, Microsoft has noted that in previous versions of Windows, the default option for external devices connected to your PCs was "Better performance". This policy allows the operating system to cache write operations on the external device to ensure integrity of the data, but the drawback was that users had to "safely" remove their USB after use.

With the release of Windows 10 version 1809 - which was made fully available in December 2018 -, this has been changed so that the default configuration is now "Quick removal", which does not allow the operating system to cache write operations, but enables people to pull the USB from their device anytime. That said, it is not recommended that people do this when write operations are being performed on the external device, and it may "degrade system performance".

You can configure these policies for each external device and Windows will remember them even after you remove the device. You can consult Microsoft's documentation to see which options to modify in the "Disk Management" settings to take advantage of either of these features, but as a reminder, do note that Quick removal is enabled by default since Windows 10 version 1809.