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Your hard drive should securely erase itself by overwriting every sector the process can take several hours to complete. Type hdderase at the DOS command prompt that appears, and then press Enter. To use the tool on your hardware, copy HDDerase.exe to a CD or USB flash drive and boot your PC from that device. National Institute of Standards and Technology–executes the Secure Erase command built into the firmware of Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives, telling the hard drive to overwrite all memory with meaningless data. If you have a hybrid hard drive or an SSD, download a copy of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research’s free Secure Erase utility this app–which conforms to the Guidelines for Media Sanitization published by the U.S. Before attempting to wipe a laptop’s drive, be sure to plug in the AC adapter if your laptop battery dies halfway through a drive wipe, the hard drive is likely to become corrupted and unusable. To ex­­punge data permanently, you need an app that writes ones and zeros, literally or figuratively, over your existing data. This reflects the unique way that SSD firmware writes data to the drive: Wear-leveling algorithms, designed to lengthen the SSD’s lifespan, cause data to be written across many different areas inside the drive.ĭeleting data during everyday use doesn’t remove the data from your drive instead, it merely erases the pointer to that data.

Solid-state drives, for instance, behave very differently from ordinary USB flash drives, hybrid hard drives (which combine a flash cache with a magnetic hard disk), or hard disk drives. If you want to safeguard your privacy further–and prevent data theft down the road–here are a few cheap and simple tools designed to wipe your hard drive, solid-state drive, or USB flash drive thoroughly before you dispose of it.īecause different types of drives use different storage methods, you need different tools to deal with each type. If your drives are encrypted and you trust the encryption protocol (full disk encryption is pretty safe), all you have to do is delete your encryption keys. So when you want to get rid of your system or drive, you should permanently erase your storage device drives before you get rid of them. Your PC’s hard drive is packed with your personal data.