I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
Shift-Del to delete files is usually much faster, though obviously this skips the recycle bin.
Moving files to the recycle bin and deleting files should take the same amount of time, both are essentially just a rewrite of the pointer to the data and don’t copy any data at all.
Not on Windows, it actually moves your files to a special directory.