Flash Drives

As mentioned in an earlier post, these little storage devices that slip into the USB port on your computer are relatively inexpensive and have quite a range in capacity.  And they can be used over and over again.  When you're finished with it just delete the files, right?  Not quite.  While your flash drive is still plugged into your computer, you can highlight the files and drag them to the trash.  That is correct, but, there is quite a bit of information that still resides on the flash drive and the next time you want to export files to it, you may get a notice that there is not enough storage remaining.  It drove me crazy because I knew I should have remaining space.  Not to worry.  This is how you can erase everything on the flash drive.

• On your dock, open up Finder
• Click on Applications
• Near the bottom of the list, click on Utilities
• Another list will appear.  Look for Disk Utilities and click
• All of your drives will be listed including a flash drive if connected.  A flash drive will be identified by capacity and name.  Just below it, if you have not named the flash drive, it will likely say, "No Name".  Click on No Name.
• Scan down to the bottom left side of the page and look for "format".  It will state what format is being used and will most likely say, "MS-DOS (FAT32).  To the right it will tell you the available space.
• Now, go to the top of the page and click on Erase.  In the middle of the page you will see Format.  It will tell you how the drive is formatted.  Continue to the right..to the highlighted up and down arrows and click on them.  There will be four choices.  On top, click on Mac OS Extended (Journaled)  Below it, where you see "No Name", click on the box and a blue frame will appear.  Now you can rename the Flash Drive anything you want.  Personalize it with your name so that when you loan it out, and someone else inserts it into their computer, it will appear on the desk top...."Tom's Flash" or whatever
• Drop down and look for erase.  Click on it and your drive will be formatted, ready for its next assignment.

Tom Gottfried