Avoid “Quick Formatting” Flash Drives to Prevent File Recovery

Avoid “Quick Formatting” Flash Drives to Prevent File Recovery: Unlike internal solid state drives, recovering deleted files from USB flash drives isn't difficult. Formatting USB flash drives will help prevent recovery, but only if you use the normal format.

Our friends at the How-To Geek explain that data recovery of internal SSDs is nearly impossible, because of how the TRIM command works. TRIM optimizes SSD performance by clearing deleted data from the SSD immediately. Unfortunately, this only works on internal drives, which means flash drives (and external SSDs) are vulnerable to data recovery.