Fundamentally, that is not the point–any discarded USB drive should have the data on it securely removed. Wait, who actually sells used USB drives?Ĭonsidering that USB flash drives are often given away as (underwhelming) event swag at technology conferences, they have become sufficiently commoditized to the point that attempting to sell them is not worth the effort. Click “Format…” and uncheck the “Quick Format” box, and click Start. On Windows 10, go to “This PC,” and right-click on the drive you want to securely erase. Formatting a drive does not, by itself, erase data from a drive. More than one pass is not necessary, as this is not magnetic media, like a traditional platter hard drive.Īfter this task completes, use the storage manager for your operating system to format the drive to create a new file system, making the drive usable again. Be careful to specify the correct drive, to avoid inadvertently overwriting the wrong drive. You’ll want to replace /dev/sdX with the actual ID of the drive. How to wipe a USB driveįor Linux and Mac OS X, you can overwrite the entire device with random data using this command from the terminal: Because of this, encrypting your drive is the best defense to preventing data theft–and protecting drives which are intended for resale, as encrypted data necessarily cannot be read by the new owner.Īdditionally, do not plug in random USB drives you find on the street. Whether it falls out of a pocket, is absentmindedly left plugged into a computer, or is swiped by someone with sticky fingers, the risk to your data is quite high. SEE: Media disposal policy (Tech Pro Research) Best practices for USB drives Six of the drives from the US could not be accessed.

In total, 20 drives appear to have had no effort made to delete data, 19 of which were from the UK.

The identity of the previous owner of the drives could be determined for 20% of drives from the US and 22% of drives from the UK. Some 68% of drives sourced from the US and 67% sourced in the UK still contained data from previous users, the report found.

Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire purchased 200 used USB flash drives–half from the US, half from the UK–to determine how securely data on the drive was stored before being disposed of. USB drive users need to exercise caution when throwing away or recycling those devices, according to a Wednesday study from Comparitech.

Best way to wipe a hard drive