How To Wipe An External Hard Drive Clean

• Wipe External Hard Drive Windows 10
• Erase Hard Drive Free
• How To Wipe An External Hard Drive Clean And Start Over

On this page, you'll learn how to effectively wipe SSD on Windows 10/8/7 on your own:

What Is Secure Erase

The Secure Erase program some time ago was 'approved' by the National Security Agency and also supports all SSD drives. For wipe you SSD drives, you can use special programs from vendors. For example, Samsung has this utility called Magician. Download the Samsung Magician image, write it to USB and boot from it.

1. Select the Advanced Tests menu, then select SED Crypto Erase. If you do not see this option, verify that you have an SED. Note: If you do not have an SED, you can select the Overwrite Erase option, and SeaTools will perform a write of zeros across the entire drive to sanitize it. This process can take several hours depending on the drive size.
2. A Simple Hard Drive Wipe Alternative Beginning in Windows Vista, the format process changed and a single write-zero pass is applied to each standard (non-quick) format. In other words, a very basic hard drive wipe is performed during a format.
3. Find your external drive, which on the bottom part of the screen should have a giant bar with black at the top of it. If it is blue, read the paragraph after this one and skip the next sentence. Right click it after making sure that is your external drive (you can tell by looking at how big it is) and select new simple volume.

Secure Erase is a method used to completely wipe out the data on a hard drive using a set of commands. Secure Erase commands write binary one or zero to the sectors on the hard drive to overwrite all the existing files. That's why the data removed by the Secure Erase commands is not recoverable by any data recovery method available.

However, although they are commands. You cannot run Secure Erase commands like you run commands in Windows 10 in Command Prompt since they are available from the firmware on the hard drive. Thus, to secure erase your SSD in Windows 10, you need third-party software like EaseUS partition manager software to help you execute these operations.

When Do You Need to Wipe an SSD

When do you need to perform a secure erase on an SSD? Completely wiping an SSD is needed when you want to:

• Resell the SSD: One of the preparations you need to make before reselling a storage device like SSD is to wipe out all the data on it, which prevents others from accessing your files.
• Prepare the SSD for another user: To protect your information, you may want to destroy the files on the storage device.
• Clean up SSD for other usages: To clear SSD for OS installation, using it as a game drive, or a second data disk, etc.
• Remove virus or malware on the device: If your SSD is infected by a virus or malware, you may want to totally remove it by secure erase your device.

How to Wipe SSD in Windows 10

Follow through the process in this part, you'll securely erase SSD and make it ready for any purpose as listed above:

We suggest you follow the tutorials one by one as presented in this part. If you don't have essential data saved on your SSD, skip the 1st guide and start from the 2nd guide.

#1st. Download SSD Secure Erase Tool to Wipe SSD on Windows 10

Professional partition tool - EaseUS Partition Master will help you securely erase and wipe an SSD in Windows 10, fully clean up SSD, making data unrecoverable with ease. This disk/partition management tool has a feature named 'Wipe Data', which works almost the same with Secure Erase commands.

'Wipe Data' vs Secure Erase Commands

Both the 'Wipe Data' feature and the Secure Erase command erase your data by overwriting all the data on your SSD. However, Wipe Data feature in EaseUS Partition Master exceeds the Secure Erase command:

• Secure Erase writes binary 1 or 0 to the disk sectors while 'Wipe Data' writes random numbers.
• Wipe Data doesn't damage the SSD, while the Secure Erase command will.
• Wipe Data in EaseUS Partition Master is easier than Secure Erase, which is especially friendly to beginners.

Get the software to wipe your SSD in Windows 10 right now:

#2nd. Simple Steps to Wipe an SSD in Windows 10

These operations cannot be undone after applying the changes. Once again, if you have valuable data saved on SSD, back up them at first.

Step 1: Install and launch EaseUS Partition Master.

Select the HDD or SSD which you want to wipe. And right-click to choose 'Wipe Data'.

Step 2: Set the number of times to wipe data.

You can set to 10 at most. Then Click 'OK'.

Step 3: Check the message.

A message tells you that the computer would restart after disk erase is recommended. How to download extract rar files. Then click 'OK'.

Step 4: Click 'Apply' to apply the changes.

Click 'Execute the operation' and then click 'Apply' to start wiping data.

Be careful that once the process is carried out by EaseUS Partition Master, the data will become unrecoverable with any data recovery software or service! Wait for the process to complete and then you can use the wiped SSD as a new disk for installing a new OS, games or sell it online.

You may also interest in: How to Install a New HDD/SSD on Windows 10/8/7.

The Bottom Line

People might want to wipe or erase an SSD drive for various reasons. Erasing an SSD (solid-state drive) can sanitize the drive. So you can make sure that the virus or malware will no longer hide somewhere in the drive.

Besides, wiping an SSD helps to recover lost performance on systems with inefficient garbage collection. But unlike a traditional hard drive disk (HDD), there are not so many tools that can wipe SSD drive. Here to save your time and efforts, we recommend you to try EaseUS partition software, a secure erase utility that does work with SSD drives.

People Also Ask About Secure Erase SSD

You can securely and completely wipe your SSD in Windows 10 to erase all the content, including personal data, viruses or malware using EaseUS Partition Master. How to get discord voice changer. If you have further questions related to secure erase SSD, check the questions and answers below, you will get a satisfying answer.

Wipe External Hard Drive Windows 10

1. Does Secure Erase damage SSD?

As explained on this page, Secure Erase is a process that runs commands from the firmware to wipe disk data, writing binary one or zero to the hard drive at a sector level.

This will make data unrecoverable on SSD, which may also do some damage to the disk while writing the 0 and 1. To protect your SSD, we suggest you try a third-party disk wiping tool like EaseUS Partition Master for help.

2. How do I avoid data loss due to securely wipe an SSD?

As we recommend, to avoid data loss while wiping an SSD, it's necessary that you back up all essential data to another device in advance. You may try EaseUS Todo Backup to create a backup image of your SSD data with the following steps:

Step 1: Launch EaseUS Todo Backup software and then choose 'File Backup', 'Disk/partition Backup' or 'System Backup' for different backup purpose.

Step 2: Choose the system, disk partition, files or apps that you want to back up. Then select a destination where you want to store the backup file.

Step 3: Click 'Proceed' to start the data backup process.

To securely wipe an SSD and make the disk clean, you'll need a professional disk wiping tool for help. As recommended on this page, EaseUS Partition Master is able to help.

3. How do I secure erase Samsung SSD?

To erase Samsung SSD, you may revert to the steps above to complete the process. Or you can follow the quick guide here to get jobs done:

#1. Back up useful data on Samsung SSD to another device.

#2. Download a reliable wipe tool to secure erase Samsung SSD.

Here you can try EaseUS Partition Master, or other wipe tools like Samsung Magician SSD Tool, SanDisk SSD Dashboard, etc.

#3. Securely erase and wipe Samsung SSD with selected wipe tool.

You can think about the complete cleaning of data from the hard disk of your Windows 10 computer if you want to sell your old computer or throw out your equipment. Before the computer will be transferred to other hands, you must completely clean the hard drives from data (among them may be personal and/or confidential data).

Every user should understand that deleting files from a disk and formatting have nothing to do with safe disk cleaning. When deleting a file from the disk and from the recycle bin, and even formatting the entire partition, it is still possible to recover user data from the disk. To do this, there is even a special class of programs that allow you to recover data after accidentally deleting or formatting a disk. Even the simplest and free tool from this class of programs allow you to recover all data with almost 100% probability.

In order to guarantee the erase of all the data from the HDD, you need to overwrite the data in all sectors on it with new data (zeros). After that, even professional programs for recovering information from disks won't be able to recover data.

The traditional way of hard disk cleanup in Windows is formatting. However, simple formatting is not enough to safely wipe data. Especially for more reliable data deletion when formatting a disk in Windows Vista and higher, the built-in format utility has a special attribute /P:count. In this attribute, you can specify how many times each sector of the volume should be overwritten by zeroes.

READ ALSOHow to View Saved Wi-Fi Passwords on Windows 10?

For example, to format and overwrite the hard disk with zeros 5 times, run the command:

format D: /fs:NTFS /p:5

WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK

DRIVE E: WILL BE LOST!

Proceed with Format (Y/N)?

Press Y and wait until formatting is complete (depending on the number of passes and disk size, this may take a long time).

Tip. The /p parameter doesn't work together with the /q (fast formatting) parameter.

According to the information on the Microsoft page, the /p parameter is redundant, since Starting from Vista and above, the format command always overwrites the disk with zeros when performing full formatting.

You can use the format command to write an additional disk or partition with zeros, but not the system C: drive.

To securely wipe the data from the system disk on which Windows is installed, you need:

1. Boot you device from the Windows installation disk (recovery disk or LiveCD). At the stage of choosing the OS language to install, press the Shift+F10;
2. In the command window that opens, run the command: Diskpart
3. Run the list disk command to list the mounted disks;
4. Find the ID of your system hard disk (by size) that you want to clean and select it (for example, Disk 1): select disk 1
5. List the partitions: list partition
6. Write down the drive letters assigned to your partitions and close the diskpart session by running the command: exit

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Erase Hard Drive Free

Using PsExec to Run Commands Remotely

1. For each of the drive letters defined above, run the command: format e: /fs:NTFS /p:2 , (replace e: with your drive letter). The format command used in this way will format the E drive with the NTFS file system and write zeros to each disk sector twice.

You can also use the free tools to safely remove data. For example, DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke or Secure Erase. These utilities are ISO images that you need to burn to any CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive using Rufus and boot your computer from them. There are several disk cleaning methods and each of these programs provide a different level of deletion reliability.

The Secure Erase program some time ago was 'approved' by the National Security Agency and also supports all SSD drives.

For wipe you SSD drives, you can use special programs from vendors. For example, Samsung has this utility called Magician. Download the Samsung Magician image, write it to USB and boot from it. Select the Secure Erase item for your SSD.

AuthorRecent PostsCyril KardashevskyI enjoy technology and developing websites. Since 2012 I'm running a few of my own websites, and share useful content on gadgets, PC administration and website promotion.Latest posts by Cyril Kardashevsky (see all)

- February 25, 2021

How To Wipe An External Hard Drive Clean And Start Over