How to completely wipe HDD after transfer?

lysthe

Prominent
Nov 10, 2017
5
0
510
I have my SSD coming in a few days. I brought my HDD down to 180GB used and my SSD is 500GB so I'm just going to clone my HDD on my SSD.

Now, once that's done, how do I completely wipe my HDD to start fresh with it? I'm not sure if just deleting and formatting will completely wipe everything off it.
 
Solution
a format will remove everything so you can then use it for data storage or whatever.

if you want to wipe it clean so you can give it away then you'll want a program that will write over the whole drive with random 1's and 0's over and over until nothing is recoverable.

a simple format is plenty if you will use it yourself. simple and effective.

but to totally clean all data there are plenty of programs you can use. a simple one i have used is called hard drive eraser (snappy name i know!!) http://www.harddriveeraser.org/

a large drive can take hours to complete a multiple pass eraser set. so plan accordingly. it is not a fast process as it totally rewrites the drive over and over again. every sector, every bit

Math Geek

Titan
Ambassador
a format will remove everything so you can then use it for data storage or whatever.

if you want to wipe it clean so you can give it away then you'll want a program that will write over the whole drive with random 1's and 0's over and over until nothing is recoverable.

a simple format is plenty if you will use it yourself. simple and effective.

but to totally clean all data there are plenty of programs you can use. a simple one i have used is called hard drive eraser (snappy name i know!!) http://www.harddriveeraser.org/

a large drive can take hours to complete a multiple pass eraser set. so plan accordingly. it is not a fast process as it totally rewrites the drive over and over again. every sector, every bit
 
Solution