If you’re replacing or upgrading your company’s USB flash drives (perhaps to the Cruzer Enterprise range of secure USB drives) then you might think of putting those obsolete drives to good use.  

There are organisations, such as InVineo, a non-profit tech outreach organisation, that take used USB drives and send them to developing countries for use in schools and higher education. 

However, whilst recycling older computer equipment to benefit others is a great idea, you need to be very careful about old flash drives and - more specifically - the data on them. 

The problem with flash drives is that just deleting files is not enough to scrub data away.  Unfortunately, nor is overwriting the old data, because unlike conventional hard disk drives, the USB drive’s flash memory controller will stop even intentional data overwrites.  While this is done to maximise the drive’s lifespan, by spreading data across the available storage space, it’s not good for security.  It leaves data potentially accessible - even if you’ve deleted all files and tried to overwrite them.  

So we would advise extreme caution if you’re thinking about recycling old flash drives.  It’s also another good reason for choosing to use encrypted USB flash drives, so when they are made obsolete, the data is still safe from prying eyes.