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If you have an external hard drive or a USB flash drive that contains information you don\u2019t need anymore, you can format it. Formatting a drive wipes out all the data on it and makes all the space on those drives available to use, just as if it were a new drive.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, we’re going to cover quick formatting, which will wipe out all the data on a drive and make it reusable. It will not make data unrecoverable, so don’t use quick formatting if someone you don’t trust will have access to the drive.<\/span><\/p>\n 1.)\u00a0 \u00a0Open File Explorer (Windows key + E)\u00a0 and under \u201cThis PC\u201d or \u201cComputer,\u201d find the drive you want to format and choose \u201cFormat\u201d from the right-click menu.<\/span><\/p>\n 2.) After you click \u201cFormat,\u201d you\u2019ll see a dialog like the one shown in the screenshot below.\u00a0 Unless you\u2019re an advanced user and know what you\u2019re doing, it\u2019s best to leave the default settings under\u00a0 \u201cFile System (NTFS\u2026), \u201cAllocation unit size 4096 bytes, and \u201cQuick Format\u201d as they are. If you choose to do so, you can change the drive name to anything you want.<\/span><\/p>\n 3.) Click \u201cStart\u201d 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\n Formatting is a great way to repurpose those old flash drives and\/or external drives containing out-of-date backups or data you no longer need.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 And remember\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n NEVER format a drive that contains any data that you need.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quick Formatting Drives If you have an external hard drive or a USB flash drive that contains information you don\u2019t need anymore, you can format it. Formatting a drive wipes out all the data on it and makes all the space on those drives available to use, just as if it were a new drive. Today, we’re\u2026 Read More »<\/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":[4383,4390,3948,4299,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30113"}],"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=30113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30114,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30113\/revisions\/30114"}],"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=30113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Format](\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2022\/format0.png\")
<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Format](\"https:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2022\/format1.png\")
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