Reader Dan Coates believes in recycling (or, at least, reformatting). He writes: I have a number of commercial flash drives with outdated information. How can I unlock them for reuse? Increasingly, ...

There's more to it than you might think. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Knowing how to format a hard drive seems like something ...

If you want to format a write-protected USB pen drive on Windows 11/10, here is how you can do that. There are three methods to format a write-protected USB flash drive, and all of them are built into ...

In Defragging: Why, How, and Whether, I warned that defragging can wear out solid state drives. Howard Meyer asked if it was safe to format flash drives and memory cards. Regular defragging can wear ...

For users who work with both Macs and PCs, having a flash drive that can work between both and seamlessly transport files can be critical. The tricky part is choosing the filesystem that provides the ...

Today’s tip shows how to format a USB flash drive with NTFS using Command Prompt and PowerShell commands. Command Prompt This example shows how to “quick format” a memory stick mounted on D: drive to ...

On an external drive, the delete key is more of a suggestion than a final verdict. Files that appear to vanish from a USB ...

When you purchase a new storage drive, it may tell you it needs reformatting, but which format is best? The main options for removable drives and memory cards these days are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS, ...