Is there a quick way to safely remove a USB flash drive under Windows?

USB flash drives are an essential tool for any admin but I find the process of safely removing a flash drive under Windows to be inconvenient (click the tray icon, find your drive in the too-much-information USB bus tree, click stop, etc...). I know that most times you can just pull the drive out but I never feel comfortable doing that.

Is there something better than what windows provides for safe removal?

If you know the drive letter, you can single-left click on the Safely Remove Hardware tray icon, then just click the drive you want to remove.

On Vista, you can right click on the drive itself in My Computer and select "Safety Remove Hardware"

I use a little utility called RemoveDrive that allows me to add 'Eject USB' to my backup script. Saves two clicks per day!

you do a shortcut to:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

And then you set an hotkey for that, like ctrl+alt+R

hotkey = remove hardware

fast&easy