Once it launches, you’ll see the drives and storage devices that are visible:īE REALLY CAREFUL that you don’t choose your main hard drive for your computer. If you’re not yet on Yosemite, you can still use Spotlight, just click on the magnifying glass icon on the top right of your menu bar… Plug in the drive you want to clean up and, if you’re in Yosemite, press Command-Space to launch Searchlight and type in “disk u”…Īs you can see, the top hit is the program you want, “Disk Utility”.

On a Mac the program of choice is Disk Utility, something supplied by Apple. Physical destruction is generally a one way street with electronics, but the old gadgets might well be useful to someone else and while they’re inexpensive commodities, an 8GB or 16GB drive can still be darn valuable to a school kid! So let’s not destroy them if it’s not necessary. There are a couple of ways you can proceed in this situation, one of which is to physically destroy the thumbdrives with a pair of pliers.

I mean, perhaps your Mom used it to bring a copy of her taxes to the accountant, or you have spreadsheets of invoices payable from your clients back when you weren’t using the Cloud? You’re smart to make sure that the USB Flashdrives you’re finding (or are they “Flash Drives” two words? I never remember!) are empty of data because you just never know what might be on it and identity theft isn’t just in the movies, unfortunately.

How to erase a flash drive memory