What is the Best Way to Wipe A Hard Drive?
What’s the benefit of wiping a hard drive?
Many users want to wipe hard drive. Well, here we conclude why people want to wipe hard drive completely.
> Wiping hard drive for reselling it. If you want to sell your old hard drive, and do not want others to recover the data via any data recovery tool, then, you’d better take some measures to erase all data on the hard drive.
> Wiping hard drive for reusing it. If you want to reuse the hard drive, then, you may want it performs better than before. Thus, wiping hard drive can reset hard drive to factory settings and you can use it like a new drive. If the hard drive is an SSD, secure erase it can restore it to its peak performance.
> Wiping hard drive for giving away to others. If you want to give away your old hard drive to others, you can wipe hard drive in advance to keep your privacy. Meanwhile, this operation will optimize the hard drive’s performance.
From those aspects, wiping a hard drive is a benefit for you. But you can't just directly delete all files and documents from File Explorer because they can be easily restored by recovery software. Next, this article will demonstrate you what is the best way to wipe a hard drive clean in Windows 10, 8, 7.
What is the best way to wipe a hard drive?
To completely wipe a hard drive, you can turn to Qiling Disk Master Standard. It is realiable and powerful wiping software designed for Windows systems, including Windows 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista. It uses zero-filling method that overwrite a hard drive or a partition with zeros to erase the disk, and prevent retrieving data from most recovery tools.
Download the software and follow the steps to see how to use it.
✍ Note: The data will be removed completely via this method and it’s impossible to recover them after that. So please be careful and back up important data to cloud or external at first.
Step 1. Connect your HDD to a computer installed Windows 10/8/7. launch Qiling Disk Master. It will show you its main interface contained the hard drive on your computer. Right click the hard drive you want to wipe, select Wipe Hard Drive in the pop up menu.
Step 2. And choose "erase time one(Fill sectors with Zero)".
✍ Note: You can upgrade to Professional edition to choose other wiping methods that provides higher securities.
Step 3. Finally, click Proceed to execute the operations.
If you need to wipe a SSD
An SSD is different with HDD, so you can't use the same way to wipe a SSD because SSDs use magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information with rotating platters coated with magnetic material. And SSD has no moving mechanical components. It stored data with memory chips, and it has limited read/write times. Limited SSD lifespan is controlled by program-erase cycles or P/E cycles. Overwriting an SSD would hurt the entire drive and decrease its lifespan.
Forunately, Qiling Disk Master Professional also provides a special way to erase an SSD securely. Different with wipe HDD, Qiling Disk Master designed the special feature to wipe SSD - Secure Erase SSD, which can permanently erase data on the SSD and restore SSD to its peak performance at the same time.
✍Note: "Secure Erase SSD" only works under Windows 7 environment at present. Thus, you need to prepare a Windows 7 computer.
Step 1. Connect SSD to the computer installed Windows 7 operating system. Launch Qiling Disk Master. In the main interface, select the SSD and right-click it. Choose Wipe> Secure Erase SSD at the pop up menu.
Step 2. It will remind you that this operation will erase all data on the SSD. If there is any important data on the SSD, make sure you have backed up the data.
Step 3. Read the SSD information, and click "Proceed". And wait for the proceeding to get finished.
✍ Note: You may meet the problem that the SSD is in frozen state. Here you should do a hot swap to relieve the frozen state. Click “here” on the window and follow the hint to do that.
Secure Erase SSD of Qiling Disk Master will reset SSD to factory settings and restore it to the peak performance. It can be used with no problem.
Conclusion
Using Qiling Disk Master to wipe hard drive should be the best way to wipe a hard drive. But it is more than a hard drive eraser software. You can also use it to repartition hard drive - it also provides you to resize partition, create partition, split partition, merge partitions, etc. If you need more advanced features like allocate free space, quick partition, you can upgrade to Qiling Disk Master Professional to use.
Related Articles
- Use Reset PC or Other Easier Solution? Check How to Wipe A Hard Drive
How do I wipe a hard drive? This article provides basic ways to wipe a hard drive. One is a third-party software, the other is the built-in feature - Reset This PC. - 2022 Best Solutions for SSD Secure Erase in Windows 10/11
Do you want to erase your files from your Windows PC securely? Then check out some of the best solutions available for Windows that can help you Secure Erase in Windows 10/11. These tools are best for SSD drives which are different from HDD, and while others can degrade performance and life, the tools in the guide will ensure nothing like that happens. - How to Wipe a Hard Drive on a Dead Computer [Windows & Mac]
How to Wipe a hard drive on a dead computer? It may appear difficult but it is possible. Here is a complete guide on wiping data from the dead computers for both Windows and Mac. - How to Wipe a Windows XP Computer Completely in 2022
Do you know how to wipe your Windows XP computer and refresh it as new? This page discuss the topic about how to wipe a Windows XP computer with or without software before recycling. For a step-by-step guide, follow this page to learn the details now.