I installed PSPP, a statistics package, on a thumb drive, which turned out to not be a great idea. PSPP didn't become 'mobile', and I ended up with thousands and thousands of tiny text files in hundreds of folders, stranded from an uninstaller. I don't know if it was simply too many, or what, but deleting the main folders wouldn't work, it'd get stuck in a loop on the progress par. I dug into a few folders and deleted my way back out, but that wasn't much faster. I don't know how those Linux guys put up with such cumbersome conglomerations.
Then I remembered how we used to format disks, back in the day. Never needed to with a thumb drive, but there was the option when I right clicked on the item in Computer. It took only a second or two to clear my drive, when attempting to delete the files via Explorer took forever or a long time.
I could even imagine copying some key files from a thumb drive to HDD, then formatitng the drive to clear cruft, and restore the important items. It is that much quicker than having to delete even a few dozen files.
