How to Clean a Flash Drive

Flash drives can store thousands of pictures, videos and songs in dozens of different folders. In fact, USB flash drives can store so much data that it's sometimes difficult to organize it. If your drive is full, you need to clean it up before transferring additional data. You can erase unnecessary files to free up some space or format the drive and erase everything. By default, files deleted from a flash drive are sent to the recycle bin; you can recover them from there.

Insert the flash drive into a USB port; avoid USB hubs whenever possible. Windows displays the drive in File Explorer a few seconds after you connect it to the computer. To erase some of the files on the drive, select them and then press "Delete" and confirm. To erase everything on the drive at once, right-click the drive in File Explorer and choose "Format" from the context menu.