The right way to wipe an external drive depends heavily on what is inside the enclosure. A Super User thread on reinstalling Linux from a USB stick spells this out clearly, the best way to wipe a ...

I am using all Macs so I've formatted my 512MB USB Thumbdrive w/ HFS+ (Mac OS X). I'm going to sell it to a good friend of mine and I'd like to wipe the drive just as I would if I sold a HD. I ...

A new service called Silver Bullet from encrypted thumb-drive vendor IronKey will let administrators wipe out or lock the data on USB sticks in the field. Silver Bullet is a Web-based service that ...

It makes sense to reuse, recycle, give away or sell on fully functional phones and computers when you’ve upgraded to the next model. Unfortunately, unethical chancers can, have and will data-mine ...

When you connect a new USB drive or external drive to a laptop, phone, or another storage-compatible device, it's mostly unusable until you format it. Formatting a drive helps prepare and set up the ...

I need to use software to securely wipe a USB key, and it has to be good enough for specific compliance organizations. All the secure wipe software I've seen only support wiping physical hard drives.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Technically, you should assume that data is never truly removed from a hard drive. That's because, for the most part, when you delete a file ...