Update, 6:12 PM ET: Clarified that you probably still don’t want to yank a USB thumb drive if you’re in the middle of writing files to it. So now, the process of safely ejecting a flash drive can be one of those things you tell your kids about, one of those “Do you remember this thing that olds used to do?”, like adjusting the tracking on a VHS tape or screaming at your family not to pick up the telephone while you’re downloading a new webpage.

Thus, files on the hard drive cannot be recovered by any method, ensuring. By way of the free disk erasure DiskGenius Free Edition, you can completely wipe hard drives and removable drives via rewriting sectors to 00 or random characters. (I just checked my System Tray, and it’s totally still there.) Case 1: Safely erase secondary HDD / external hard drive / SD card / USB flash drive in Windows 10/8/7. Plus, the company’s had protections to keep your flash drives safe since Windows 7, according to my Microsoft-expert colleague Tom Warren.īut it’s also true that Microsoft has been sending mixed messages about the need to safely remove drives for a while, and the operating system definitely still features a vestigial “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media” feature. It just so happens to be making the rounds now that the company’s notifying IT professionals that the update is being deployed more broadly. Technically, Microsoft flipped this switch back in October when version 1809 first started rolling out, so this won’t be a revelation for every reader. To do so, you have to follow the below steps: In the first step, you have to locate the file that you want to delete and right-click on it and then choose Properties option on the pop-up menu. Basically, “quick removal” keeps Windows from continuously trying to write to a flash drive, which could help in the event you disconnect it. Sometimes you have to get permission from the Windows Explorer to delete the files from flash drives. Windows 10 has a feature called “quick removal” that lets you yank a drive anytime (so long as you’re not actively writing files to it), and it’s now the default setting for each new drive you plug in as of Windows 10 version 1809, according to Microsoft’s own support guidance. Well, Microsoft is confirming once and for all that - in Windows 10 - it’s no longer a thing you need to worry about. Type format X: /fs:NTFS /p:1(X is the drive letter of your USB) in the Command Prompt window and press Enter to format USB with the NTFS file system and write zeros to every sector of the drive. But, it didn’t clean the data completely from. You know how every tech expert in your life told you how crucially important it was to safely eject a flash drive before ripping it out of your PC? Have you been that tech expert yourself? Step 1.Type 'CMD' in the search box, right-click the search outcome, and click Run as administrator. Some users generally delete the files from the USB drive or just format the thumb drive in a Quick Format way.

How to clear flash drive