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How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive? Get Top 3 Ways

  author
Rollins Duke   
Published: May 9th, 2024 • 6 Min Read

Overview: How to completely wipe a USB drive? Before you sell or donate your USB drive to someone else, make sure to erase it completely. This page defines secure, simple and verified methods to completely wipe Flash drives while ensuring data safety.

A USB drive is a small, high-capacity mobile storage device that connects to a computer over the USB interface. It is lightweight, portable, and simple to use and carry. As with a hard disk, you may occasionally need to completely wipe a USB drive.

To completely wipe flash drive, some users may erase files or format the USB device. However, mere deleting or formatting will not totally erase files. Additionally, we shall explain this in depth below. Prior to that, let us consider why users are required to execute this work.

Table of Content Hide
  1. Importance to Completely Wipe Flash Drive
  2. Can We Recover Data After Completely Erasing USB Flash Drive?
  3. How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive? – 3 Methods
    1. Use In-built Format Tool
    2. Erase a USB Drive Using CMD
    3. Pro Way to Completely Wipe a USB Drive
  4. Conclusion

Importance to Completely Wipe Flash Drive

For several reasons it becomes necessary or important to erase USB drive completely:

  • Increase the amount of space available for storing fresh data. When you completely wipe a USB drive, all of the data on the device is wiped, and you may utilize all of the vacant space on the device.
  • The material in drive is very sensitive and must be deleted forever.
  • Before you sell a USB flash drive, make a secure wipe of all of the data on the device.
  • Unknown virus or malware on a USB flash drive should be removed.
  • Change the file system format, for example, from FAT32 to NTFS, or from NTFS to exFAT or Ext4 format.

Can We Recover Data After Completely Erasing USB Flash Drive?

If you’re looking to just repair USB drive issues or corruption, formatting may be helpful. However, if you want to completely wipe a USB drive before sending it to another person, selling it, or disposing of it, formatting is not the only way to go.

Only the data on the USB drive is made unusable by formatting it, however there are a variety of data recovery program available that can restore data from a formatted USB drive. A bad individual can use such software to access your data, putting you in danger of being arrested or otherwise penalized. If you want to get back data from your own formatted USB flash drive then you can use BitRecover USB Flash Drive Recovery tool.

Thus, deleting data or formatting the storage drive is not the safest way to permanently and completely wipe flash drive data that can’t be recovered.

How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive? 3 Methods

You can find different methods with step-by-step procedure to completely erase USB drive:

Method 1- Use In-built Format Tool to Completely Wipe Flash Drive

  1. Plug your USB drive into your computer.
  2. Open the Windows File Explorer and locate the USB drive.
  3. Right-click on the drive and choose the option to format it.
  4. Choose the desired capacity and file system.
  5. Tick the box for “Quick Format” and click on the Start button to completely wipe a USB drive.

Method 2- How to Completely Erase a USB Drive Using CMD?

  1. To begin, insert the USB flash drive into your computer.
  2. Press the Windows key + R together to open the Run dialog.
  3. In the search box, type CMD and then click Ok to completely wipe flash drive.
  4. Now, type these commands one by one and hit Enter after each line:
    • diskpart
    • list disk
    • select disk (Make sure to use the number of your USB drive)
    • clean or clean all
  5. Press the enter key for each of the commands separately.
  6. Finally your USB drive data has been successfully erased.
  7. Now, give it a moment until the wiping/erasing is finished. Once you see the message saying “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk,” type exit. Then, double-check to completely wipe a USB drive.

Issues Related with Manual Methods:

  • Both ways need lots of steps which consumes time, especially if you have many USB drives to clean.
  • Using the format tool and CMD might be tricky for some people, which could lead to mistakes or not completely wipe a USB drive.
  • Even if you try to delete everything, there’s still a chance that someone could get back your info using special software.
  • Even if you do everything right, there’s no sure if you have completely wipe flash drive.

Method 3- Pro Way to Completely Wipe a USB Drive

We can see there are multiple tools are accessible on the internet for the purpose of wiping data. However, you must select one that is completely safe and secure to download. We’d recommend BitRecover BitWipe Wizard, one of the most popular file erasing software. It is a do-it-yourself application that effectively deletes current and erased data (deleted or formatted), including internet searches, history, system and application traces. We ensure you that this application will completely wipe flash drive in some moments. So, just download the software to completely wipe a USB Drive.

How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive with Advanced Tool?

Now, pick “files and folders” if you want to access specific files and folders; otherwise, select “Logical Drives.”

how to completely wipe a USB drive

Following that, Select Wipe Options and and choose “Free Space” if you only want to eliminate free space on the drive, or “Total Space” if you want to wipe the drive completely.

free-space

Now, by clicking on the “Drives” option, pick the drives from which you wish to delete data. And then click the Next button to completely wipe flash drive.

choose-drive

Now that the tool window with chosen data has shown, choose the folders and files you desire to delete and click next to completely wipe a USB drive.

choose-folders

Select “Filter Options” to delete certain files and apply the filter.

choose-filters

And now, from the drop-down menu, select the wipe technique that meets your requirements.

choose-wipe-method

Press the erase button; a warning notice will display; click the yes symbol one more.

continue

That’s it. How to completely wipe a USB Drive query has been resolved.

Let’s Come to the Conclusion

In this post, we’ve discussed why it’s critical to completely wipe flash drive. We have provided the greatest and easiest-to-use do it yourself program, which allows you to complete this work quickly and effortlessly. The recommended program enables users to completely wipe a USB drive on Windows without encountering any difficulties. The user interface of this application is extremely user-friendly. This task is readily accomplished by both technically savvy and non-technically savvy users.