How to Destroy a Flash Drive? Here’s the Full Guide

USB flash drives should be one of the most commonly used mobile storage media in our daily work. As technology evolved, older USB drives were gradually replaced by more advanced USB ones. Therefore, many people need to dispose of flash drives that are no longer used, and they don’t want anyone to reuse the drive or obtain the data on it.

How to destroy a flash drive so that no one can reuse the flash drive or recover its data? Read the article and find instant solutions.

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How to Destroy Data on a Flash Drive

Sometimes, you may just want to destroy sensitive data on a USB flash drive so that no one can recover its data. In this case, you can choose to wipe your USB flash drive to prevent someone from stealing your data.

You can do this using the MiniTool Partition Wizard for free. It has five different methods with different speeds and security levels.

What’s more, MiniTool Partition Wizard offers lots of helpful features for partition/disk management such as partition hard drive, convert MBR to GPT, recover data from hard drive, and more.

MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Connect the USB flash drive to your PC and launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to get the main interface. Select the USB flash drive that you want to wipe and choose Wipe Disk from the left action panel or the right-click menu.

Step 2: Choose one of five wiping methods listed on the pop-up window and click OK. The more time it costs, the higher security you will have.

Step 3: Click on Apply to carry out the operation. Then the wiping process starts automatically and you just need to wait patiently until the process ends.

How to Destroy a Flash Drive Physically

If you want to physically destroy a USB flash drive, you can do one of the following methods. Before continuing with that section, you need to know where the data is stored in the USB flash drive.

The data in any USB flash drive is stored in its memory chip. You would need to damage the flash chip to render any remaining data unrecoverable. To access this memory chip, you need to remove or open the drive casing.

1. Blowtorch burns USB flash drive

Burning a chip with a blowtorch until it melts is a surefire way to ensure your data is lost forever. You can then also burn the casing to eliminate all traces of the USB flash drive. Generally, it takes about two minutes to burn a memory chip. This is one of the best and safest ways to handle data.

2. Violent hammering

Another method you can try is to physically damage the memory chip by hammering or cutting it into pieces, making the data inaccessible.

3. Immerse in water

You can try submerging the flash drive in water for a few hours or days.

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Bottom Line

In this article, we describe how to destroy a flash drive. You can choose to destroy data on a flash drive or physically destroy a USB flash drive according to your needs.