{"id":28084,"date":"2024-03-19T08:37:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T12:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=28084"},"modified":"2024-03-19T08:37:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T12:37:56","slug":"formatting-drives-a-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/formatting-drives-a-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Formatting Drives: A Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;\">Formatting Drives: A Guide<br \/>\n<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #999999;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">This tip is for Windows 10 and Windows 11<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">If you have an external hard drive or a USB flash drive that contains information you don&#8217;t need anymore, you can format it to erase all the data on it and reuse the drive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"> Formatting a drive wipes out all the data on the drive and makes all the space on those drives available to use &#8211; just as if it were a new drive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">1.)\u00a0 \u00a0Open File Explorer (Windows key + E)\u00a0 and under &#8220;This PC&#8221; or &#8220;Computer&#8221; find the drive you want to format and choose &#8220;Format&#8221; from the right-click menu.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2022\/format0.png\" alt=\"Format a Drive -Cloudeight\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">2.) After you click &#8220;Format&#8221; you&#8217;ll see a dialog like the one shown in the screenshot below.\u00a0 Unless you&#8217;re an advanced user and know what you&#8217;re doing, it&#8217;s best to leave the default settings under\u00a0 &#8220;File System (NTFS&#8230;), &#8220;Allocation unit size 4096 bytes&#8221; and &#8220;Quick Format&#8221; as they are. If you choose to do so, can change the drive name to anything you want.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2022\/format1.png\" alt=\"Format a Drive -Cloudeight\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">3.) Click &#8220;Start&#8221; to start the format. A Quick Format can take from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the size of the drive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">Formatting is a great way to repurpose those old flash drives and\/or external drives containing out-of-date backups or data you no longer need.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">REMEMBER!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;\">NEVER format a drive that contains data that you need.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Formatting Drives: A Guide This tip is for Windows 10 and Windows 11 If you have an external hard drive or a USB flash drive that contains information you don&#8217;t need anymore, you can format it to erase all the data on it and reuse the drive. Formatting a drive wipes out all the data on\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/formatting-drives-a-guide\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4383,4391,4390,3948,4299,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28084"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28086,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28084\/revisions\/28086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}