Windows 10: Remove recycle bin + from external disk drive

Ed, thanks for a good answer. I'll live with it.

 

I use a USB external drive for backups. MS gives me a Recycle Bin and a System Volume Information directory, neither of which I can get rid of. Am I stuck with them?

:)

 

How to empty external drive using recycle bin on Windows 10 computer.

If the drives have $Recycle.Bin folders (as would be expected given their size), then they
do have a recycle bin obviously. The way you access the recycle bin of the external drive is the exact same way you access the recycle bin for your system. So let me repeat - the UI is
one and the same. The recycle bin icon on your desktop if double-clicked will open and show you files deleted both from internal as well as external drives.

If your recycle bin doesn't show files deleted from external drives, that means their recycle bin folders have got disconnected or unlinked from the system's recycle bin. I also provided a couple of solutions for that.

 

How to empty external drive using recycle bin on Windows 10 computer.

Don't see what the big problem is. Normally Windows
may or may not create Recycle Bin folders on removable drives depending on their size (smaller ones don't have them though I don't know the exact threshold).

So if your external drive doesn't have a Recycle Bin folder (in Win10 it'll be named $Recycle.Bin) then any file you delete will be permanently deleted, just as if you had pressed Shift+Del instead of Del.

If your external drive does have a Recycle Bin folder however, then any files you delete from the drive will go into that folder and simply be visible in the Recycle Bin shown on your desktop. The same way that files deleted from any internal drive will
show up in the same desktop Recycle Bin, files deleted from external drives with Recycle Bin folders will also show up there.

In short, double-click the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop and in the resulting unified view you'll be able to see files deleted from external drives (with Recycle Bin folders) too.
You can then select and delete some of them permanently, or simply empty the Recycle Bin to get rid of all of them.

In certain cases the external drive's Recycle Bin folder can get unlinked from the system's Recycle Bin, leading to deleted files in the former not showing up in the latter. In that situation you can try either Disk Cleanup, or better still delete the folder
itself from File Explorer or the command prompt. Windows will automatically recreate it next time the drive's accessed.

 

Yes, more or less. They're part of the file system that lets you read from and write to storage devices, including USB external drives. Here's a discussion from answers.microsoft.com that you may find illuminating (particularly the reply from Ratandeep of Microsoft).
HTH,
--Ed--