The drives ranged in size from 32MB all the way up to 128GB. The researchers bought 100 used thumb drives on eBay, secondhand shops and traditional auctions in the United Kingdom, then did the same in the United States. Comparitech recommends AweEraser, Super Eraser and WipeDrive as paid solutions for both Windows and macOS with lifetime licenses ranging from $30 to $50. CCleaner, KillDisk, DiskGenius and Partition Wizard all have free Windows options. It might not hurt to do it a few times.īut if you have confidential or compromising material on the drive, then use a dedicated file-erase program or drive formatter. If you just want to protect personal stuff that wouldn't be too embarrassing if it got out, then try the full-formatting options built into Windows, macOS or Linux to format the drive. You've got to at least do a full-format procedure, which might still leave enough traces for a professional disk-recovery program to find, or use a dedicated file-wiping program, which should get rid of everything.
