Completely erase a USB drive

pkarandi

New Member
I am getting ready to sell/donate a USB pen drive and a USB external hard drive. I want to make sure I remove ALL data from both drives. For my regular hard drive, in this situation I would use DBAN, but that doesn't work on USB drives. What is the best method to ensure these USB drives are completely clean before I sell them?

My thought is that I should just use Windows Explorer to "Erase" all the files on the two drives, and then run the on-demand Eraser to clean up all the unused space on the drives. Does that sound right - is that secure enough?

I am suprised that there is no option in the Eraser on-demand GUI to simply wipe clean a drive so that it can be disposed (like DBAN does). Thanks for any help!
 
Your proposed method should be OK.

The USB flash only needs one pass. Multiple passes will probably offer no additional security.

Depending on the nature of the level of security you require, multiple passes may be desireable on the USB external hard drive.
 
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