GoKawiilGiven the current state of memory and storage prices, it might seem counterintuitive to even consider throwing away functional USB drives, but we all have a couple of old ones lying around that are either too slow or too limited in capacity to be particularly useful anymore. In such cases, it makes perfect sense to properly recycle or dispose of older storage drives. However, simply deleting the files stored on the drive isn't enough to ensure your data is safely erased. All this does is mark the space that was occupied by the files as available for new data.
If your drive ever falls into the wrong hands, data recovery software could still succeed in restoring those deleted files. An old flash drive containing sensitive documents such as tax records or scanned IDs could turn into a privacy risk. A full format of the drive is therefore recommended. This takes much longer than a quick format because it scans the drive for bad sectors and overwrites existing data, making data recovery much more difficult.
If you want maximum peace of mind, though, you don't need to stop at just a full format. Physical destruction of the drive is the safest option if you don't intend to use it again. This is especially helpful if the drive you want to discard isn't being recognized by your computer in the first place, preventing you from wiping its contents. Cornell University's IT security guidance recommends that functional drives to be recycled should be overwritten three times, and those that are to be disposed of should be physically destroyed.