What you need is a utility that can quickly get at all the visible data. Therefore, it's unlikely someone would be able to get to those blocks using consumer-grade recovery software (a government agency might be able to, however). However, since the over provisioned blocks are out of circulation, they won't be used (or visible to software) again until they've already been overwritten. A full drive overwrite wouldn't touch these blocks, which could have data in them. So there might be 5 or 10 percent of blocks that are unavailable to the OS at any given time. SSDs also use overprovisioning to extend the life of the drive and replace any blocks that fail over time. Hard drives need multiple overwrites because magnetic media can leave remnants of data, but all SSDs have a limited number of write cycles so overwriting them multiple times is overkill. This brute-force overwrite method won't work as well for SSDs. The best way to erase an HDD, which we'll cover in more detail below, is to use a program that writes random data over all the sectors several times so that no remnants of the old files remain. They know how to erase a hard drive so that nobody can ever steal your information.Securely erasing an SSD is different than doing the same process on a mechanical hard drive. If you are scrapping your computer, take it to a specialist computer recycler like TechReset.If you are selling or donating your computer, take it to a local IT support company that knows how to erase a hard drive.

If you don’t think you’ll be able to learn the data wiping skills, or you don’t have the time, then you have two options that depend on what you are doing with your computer: What if I Don’t Want to Wipe the Hard Drive Myself? This article will take you through the key steps for how to erase a hard drive on a Windows PC or a Mac.

Just deleting the files won’t prevent access, so learning how to wipe a hard drive is crucial for anyone who owns a computer. This erases all your private, personal, and confidential information so that no one else can read it. The Need for Wiping a Hard Drive Before Reselling or Recyclingīefore you recycle or dispose of any computer, it is very important that you wipe hard drives.

Wipe external hard drive