But if you intend to wipe sensitive data from your USB drive before giving it away to your friends/family, selling it out, or disposing it off, formatting is not the solution.įormatting the drive only makes the data inaccessible, but there are multiple data recovery software that can recover data from a formatted USB drive. If you simply want to fix USB drive errors or corruption, formatting can help. Does Formatting the USB Drive Really ‘Erase’ Data? But are you sure that the data is gone forever? Let’s dig in a little deeper. Your USB drive will be formatted successfully. Once done, click Finish and close the window. Choose to Format… from the available options.Go to This PC, locate the USB drive, and right-click on it.Connect the USB drive and open Windows File Explorer.You can simply format your USB drive through File Explorer. How to Format a USB drive Method 1: Format USB drive through File Explorer Windows 10 supports FAT and NT file system for both quick and full format of your USB drive. However, as it runs an advanced check for bad sectors, it can take a longer time than quick format. It enables you to delete data from the drive and also change the file system.

With a quick format, you can change the file system of the drive.įull format checks for bad sectors on the drive. This data can be overwritten with new data over a period of time with continued usage of the drive. The data remains there, but you cannot access it. It doesn’t delete the files but removes the file pointers from the drive, due to which the drive space becomes available. Quick format doesn’t check for the bad sectors. However, both processes work differently. Both are done to clear data from the drive. There are two types of drive formatting – Quick Format and Full Format. However, before that, let’s understand the types of formatting. You can choose any of the methods given in this article to format a USB drive. For example, you may want to permanently get rid of your confidential data, or fix some drive errors, such as USB device not recognized, Please insert the disk, there is a problem with USB drive. There could be several reasons behind wanting to format a USB drive. Formatting a USB drive is quite similar to formatting any storage drive.

Wipe usb drive