How to reformat thumbdrive & compact flash?

[asolo]

I can drag files from these devices to the trash. However, although thumbdrive shows no files, the "get info" option shows capacity still used. Compact flash shows empty except for some self-created vestiges of something. I want to assured of 100% usability after I've transfered or deleted files from these devices.

How do I simply format these drives? That's what I'd like to do.

[mynameis]

Just open up disk utility, you can format them in there.

[zeta101]

asolo, reformatting will get rid of everything but you should know the following for future reference. When you trash something from an external drive (thumbdrive, hard drive etc) all that actually happens is that the files get moved to an invisible folder on the drive called trashes. To get rid of these files you just need to empty the trash while the disk is plugged in.

[asolo]

Interesting to not find the "format" option I am accustomed to.

It appears I am deleting the data OK except......I must be doing something improperly because complete wipe is taking 30-40 seconds. Complete reformats on the PC used to take 10-12 and the iMac has been faster than the PC doing everything up until now.

Devices I do this to frequently are 2gb thumb drive and 1gb compact flash card.