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#21
For what its worth, as near as I can tell my various USB thumb drives don't have the hidden recycle bin folder but my two USB external hard drives do. Size related?
It is a weird thing. I use drives in USB docking stations. Even if I set them to not use the Recycle Bin, and empty my recycle bin for my system drive, when I scan with Malwarebytes it always shows scanning the recycle bin. Not just saying "scanning recycle bin" and nothing being there. It shows funky file names while doing it. Kinda' strange.
My USB thumb drives don't get added to the properties of the Recycle Bin either (when right clicking the icon on the desktop) whereas the external drives do. The external drives are USB powered too...not from the mains. It's a bit of a head scratcher this one.
You said a mouthful!
My 32Gb USB NTFS stick does not have a $RECYCLE.BIN. Nor does my portable USB drive (spinner, 18Gb) but it's formatted FAT32.
What is striking to me is that when I look at Explorer using Tiles, all of my USB-pluggable spinners appear together with the fixed "Hard Disk Drives", and at least the NTFS ones have $RECYCLE.BINs, but the flash drives appear exclusively as "Devices with Removable Storage" and don't have $RECYCLE.BINs. And all of these appear together as one happy family under the same "Disk drives" category in Device Manager, including that the Kingston flash stick uses the same driver as the FreeAgent spinner!
I do wonder how Windows knows to treat them differently (maybe it. Again, I want to hear back from Corazon who said his USB spinner(s) don't have $RECYCLE.BINs???
P.S. In Device Mgr I see under the Volumes tab that the USB Stick w/no RECYCLE.BIN is shown as Type: Removable, and the FreeAgent spinner is shown as Type: Basic. This must be the key though I don't know how these types are established...
The devices themselves probably provide this information when queried by the mass storage driver...
Though as was mentioned, the line between thumb drive and USB mounted spinner in size, performance and use is getting thin these days :)
The Recycle Bin only stores files deleted from hard drives, not from removable media, such as flash drives, memory cards and floppy disks. Nor does it store files deleted from network drives... That is the reason why USB thumb drives which are solid state devices do not have Recycle Bin.
I have never used a SSD, so I am not sure whether a SSD will have a Recycle Bin or not. I assume they have been built to have a Recycle Bin because they work like a fast HDD.
Hmm, maybe it's a coding hack to make it easier to implement the stuff. That's all I can figure.