This process could take several minutes to several hours depending on how big the drive is and what method you choose. Back up anything you want to keep, such as photos, software product keys, etc. When the hard drive wipe is complete, there will be absolutely no way to get anything on the drive back. If you've been using an online backup service , you can safely assume that all your important files are already backed up online.
If you haven't been so proactive, pick from several free offline backup tools that can save your files to an external hard drive. Back up everything you want to keep; sometimes several virtual drives share space on a single physical hard drive.
View the drives volumes that sit on a hard drive from the Disk Management tool in Windows. Download a free data destruction program. Any of the first six programs we recommend on that list will work great because they can be used to wipe a hard drive from outside of Windows, a necessary feature if you want to wipe the drive that Windows is installed on.
We're big fans of DBAN , our first pick on that list. It's probably the most widely used hard drive wiping tool but please know that it doesn't wipe solid-state drives. There are actually several ways to completely erase a hard drive , but using data destruction software is the easiest and still allows the hard drive to be used again. Wipe the hard drive according to the program's instructions. Most data destruction programs offer several methods.
If you're curious about the effectiveness or methods used to complete the wipe, see Data Sanitization Methods.
Plug in your laptop or verify the battery's fully charged. The total time it takes to finish the HDD wipe depends on the size of the drive and the speed of the computer. When it's all said and done, you can be confident that whatever information was on the drive is now gone for good.
You can now install Windows on the drive, create a new partition , sell or give away the hard drive or computer, recycle or dispose of it, restore your backed up files, or whatever else you need to do. Beginning in Windows Vista, the format process changed and a single write-zero pass is applied to each standard non-quick format.
In other words, a very basic hard drive wipe is performed during a format. If a single write-zero pass is good enough for you, consider your drive wiped after a regular format in Windows 10, 8, 7, or Vista.
If you want something even more secure, follow the hard drive wipe instructions above. This is a wipe of just the partition you're formatting.
If you have more than one partition on a physical hard drive, you'll need to format those additional drives as well if you want to consider the entire physical disk as "wiped. If what you really want to do is just make sure that files you delete on a regular basis are really gone and not retrievable with special tools, a data-wiping program is more than you need.
Jul 3, AM in response to kingfisher In response to kingfisher Selling old Mac 4 Apple support. Jul 3, AM. I have never seen any published information as to the time required per MB for using Disk Utility's secure erase methods. For anything other than the single-pass methods, it would be best described as "an extremely long time. Jul 3, PM in response to kingfisher In response to kingfisher Jul 4, AM in response to kingfisher In response to kingfisher Are you sure that someone really really is interested in what is on your disk, and has the technical know how and equipment to extract deleted files?
Jul 4, AM. I've done this before it takes about one and a half days for the most secure option on snow leopard for a gb hd for a iMac How long does it take to complete a 7-pass erase on a hard disk? I did a single pass secure erase on the GB internal hard drive. On my 24" early iMac, with a 3. The erase progress box indicated that the erase would take 1 hour and 30 minutes. I did not watch it until the end of the erase but, at the rate it was progressing, I would estimate that it took less than 2 hours to complete.
To answer another user's remark, I don't know how interested anyone might be to uncover my data, and it is unlikely that they would have the skills and tools necessary to do it, but better spend a little computer power to avoid finding out the hard way.
It took very little of my time, since I started the secure erase just before I went to sleep. I began the secure erase at AM and the process completed at PM the same day. Since the actual formatting of the drive takes less than a minute with Apple's Disk Utility, the disk formatting time is negligible.
Therefore, the 7-pass erase on the gigabyte drive took 18 hours and 22 minutes total minutes. Of course you are right.
I was just trying to find some kind of benchmark. As I was going to use an internal drive, I expected my secure erase to be faster. Yes it is. From a. In , Peter Gutmann published a paper that upset the status quo by affirming that some laboratories were theoretically capable of retrieving data from overwritten hard disks by using sophisticated tools such as magnetic force microscopes. As a result, he proposed an overwriting method consisting of 35 passes! No need to panic, however.
Also, this was a combination of three different algorithms to overwrite different line encoding schemes, which partly explains the large number of passes. About the same time, security expert Bruce Schneier published a book containing a method for data overwriting using seven passes: one pass using ones, the next pass using zeroes and passes three through seven using other static or random characters. Curiously enough, early in , several national agencies released operating manuals that recommended the use of more than three passes.
It soon became popular in Europe to use overwriting methods that consisted of four to seven passes. Later in , the DoD Instead, it delegated that decision to government oversight agencies CSAs, or Cognizant Security Agencies , allowing those agencies to determine best practices for data sanitization in most cases. Meanwhile, the U. NIST , Rev. Multiple write passes or more complex values may optionally be used.
Even for Purge, one pass will suffice, it said, though an inverted three-pass method is also an option. Finally, in , the newer BSI GS standards were made public, combining one to two overwriting passes of random data with firmware-based erasure. With the rise of laptops and the need for speed, non-volatile storage trends have seen an uptick in solid-state drives also known as flash memory drives or SSDs.
They are also smaller, lighter, more resistant to damage and consume less power. This is because SSDs have mechanisms that minimize wear wear leveling by using non-addressable overprovisioning areas within the drive where data can be left behind. Furthermore, multiple passes also come at a cost: premature wear on SSDs that reduces the overall lifetime of the media.
Fortunately, Blancco not only erases magnetic-based media, we also offer a patented SSD erasure method to fully and securely overwrite different types of SSDs, simplifying the process and speeding up erasure across a range of flash-based storage devices.
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