Is there a best way to wipe a hard drive? When we need to sell our PC to others, we’ll consider wiping the hard drive. In the following contents, you’ll learn how to do that and also, some basic tips to make your hard drive cleaner will be provided.
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 to perform better than before. Thus, wiping and cleaning computer 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.
Even when you want to dispose of your old hard drive, 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 11, 10, 8, 7.
To completely wipe a hard drive, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Software. It is realiable and powerful hard drive cleaning software designed for Windows systems, including Windows 11, 10, 8, 7. 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.
A free and reliable disk partition software that helps you resize partitions, migrate OS, convert disks, and optimize PC efficiently.
✍ 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. launch AOMEI Partition Software. It will show you its main interface contained the hard drive on your computer. Click the Wipe tab andselect Wipe Hard Drive in the pop up menu.
Step 2. Select the disk you want to wipe and clickOKto continue.
Step 3. And choose Fill in 0and click OK.
✍ Note: You can upgrade to advanced edition to choose other wiping methods that provides higher securities.
Step 4. Finally, click Apply to execute the operations.
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, AOMEI Partition Software also provides a special way to erase an SSD securely. Different with wipe HDD, AOMEI Partition Softwaredesigned 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 AOMEI Partition Software 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. Click Next.
Step 3. Read the SSD information, and click "Next". 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 AOMEI Partition Assistant will reset SSD to factory settings and restore it to the peak performance. It can be used with no problem.
Using AOMEI Partition Assistant 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 AOMEI Partition Software to use.