HDD eraser format

[briareos_kerensky]

I've got a bunch of 4TB WD Reds that are sitting unused after I changed them for 6TB drives and I want to sell them. Can anyone recommend a good, possibly freeware, program to securely erase drives? I've seen Active@Kill and Disk Wipe, are the most common options, does anyone have any other suggestion? OS would be Windows.

[Deuteros]

CCleaner has a feature called 'Drive Wiper' that does what I believe you're looking for. You can choose between 1, 3, 7 or 35 passes / overwrites. Since I've never used this feature, I have no idea how long it would take on such large HDDs.

[CMcK]

Overwriting a drive with zeroes takes a while but is the best way to wipe a drive.

[charlesr]

I don't think that's true. A single pass isn't enough if you have sensitive data. Some techniques can still recapture old data. DoD specifies 3 passes. However for most people it's probably enough.

Darik's Boot N Nuke does what you need, although I think there's a fork called Nwipe which is more up to date. It runs from a bootable usb or CD.

[MartyG]

For a 4TB drive, I'd imagine a 3 pass wipe could take more than 48 hours to complete. It's not a quick process.

I've used DBAN (as Charles has suggested) before on smaller drives and it does the job well, you just need a lot of patience

[EvilBoris]

I have a friend who was an IT consultant for the government, he claims that they most time efficient way to make sure a HDD is non-recoverable is to physically destroy it. He said even after 8 passes of zeroing, that some data can still be recovered.

I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky to find someone that could be bothered to try and recover anything after you had zeroed it.

[briareos_kerensky]

I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky to find someone that could be bothered to try and recover anything after you had zeroed it.

If someone has the ability to read "dump" data between magnetic tracks on a HDD platter I wouldn't even bother quick-formatting the drive. I was just looking for something that won't let the average user retrieve data with a simple recovery program.

[randombs]

Alternatively, Windows' own diskpart utility can zero out an entire drive via the command 'clean all'.

If you've never used diskpart before it can be a bit scary(no confirmation for anything!) but the short version is to type diskpart at the command prompt, then you'll get this. Type the bold stuff:

DISKPART> [I][B]list disk[/B][/I]

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          278 GB  1024 KB           <-- this will very likely be your boot disk. DON'T SELECT IT!
  Disk 1    Online           12 TB      0 B        *  <-- this might be your target disk

DISKPART> [I][B]select disk 1[/B][/I]

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART>[I][B] clean all[/B][/I]

Apparently it erases at a rate of 300GB/hour. I'm not sure if that's fast or not. Also, it doesn't display the progress while you erase which could be annoying.

I guess you could just run it four times to erase all four disks at once and also still use the computer for other things, unlike a boot CD approach.

[briareos_kerensky]

I used diskpart to expand a couple of VMs, never realized it could be used to flat a drive.

[charlesr]

Neither did I. Good info.

[noobish hat]

You might not be able to sell them for the full amount though.

[randombs]

Me neither until I googled

That example output I gave was from our domain controller(otherwise it would've been Japanese gobbledegook). I most definitely did NOT type 'clean all' on that!