Best way to wipe drives for sale

Clum

Clum

Clum

Soldato
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Have just sold my gaming PC and am wondering what the best way to clean the drives is, before sending it on to the buyer? my main concern is making sure any data on them is unrecoverable, as obviously I have used them for every day purposes as well i.e., credit card purchases/other personal info. Have 3 500GB and a 30GB SSD to do, so would also be good if it was a process that didn't take too long.

Is a standard format ok, or is something more in depth recommended?
 
Standard format doesn't wipe the drive as such, just delete the fat association. Do a google for "hard drive zeroing", there are several open source apps I believe.
 
You're screwed if you need quick and secure (and want to sell on the drives)

Formatting just pretends there's nothing on the drive and lets you write over old data when space is needed. Takes very little time to do that and little effort to reverse.

Wiping is the secure way but it has to over write everything.

Clum said:
a process that didn't take too long.
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Writing over a drive takes quite a while.

Assuming say 125MB/s write speed, to write over a drive of 512,000MB will take you just over 1 hour.

That's one pass, multiple passes will be accordingly longer.
 
Clum said:
Is a standard format ok, or is something more in depth recommended?
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A full format in Vista or Win7 (not XP or earlier though) will zero-fill the drive, making any data completely unrecoverable. Alternatively you could use DBAN or one of the many other third-party utilities out there, but even then there's no need for anything more than a one-pass zero fill.

This same question gets asked here over and over and over and over and over and over and over BTW...
 
umm, no. format a drive in win7 then run recovery software and you can still get back files. not all, but some.

i sold a drive with questionable content on it but only after a format, a new truecrypt partition that formatted the whole drive, then 3 pass format.

i couldn't get anything back after that.
 
tomos said:
umm, no. format a drive in win7 then run recovery software and you can still get back files. not all, but some.
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Umm, yes. A *full* (not quick) format in Vista or Win7 that's allowed to complete properly (obviously) will erase everything permanently, irrevocably, irretrievably.

It's pretty simple to try it yourself if you're not sure.
 
Eraser works well. I used to use some pretty hardcore recovery software and Eraser would completely obliterate any trace of the data.
 
CaptainCrash said:
Umm, yes. A *full* (not quick) format in Vista or Win7 that's allowed to complete properly (obviously) will erase everything permanently, irrevocably, irretrievably.

It's pretty simple to try it yourself if you're not sure.
Click to expand...

i did, it doesn't why do you think we're talking about other methods of data erasure?
 
It's worth mentioning that one zero-fill pass is NOT enough. Even now, hard disk sectors are not perfectly accurate. One pass will leave traces that are recoverable by the right forensic methods. Four to seven passes is more like it.

For SSDs, you need to make sure that 'trimmed' sectors are also zero-written, since they'll not be written over in a standard format, as far as I know.
 
FXL5 said:
It's worth mentioning that one zero-fill pass is NOT enough. Even now, hard disk sectors are not perfectly accurate. One pass will leave traces that are recoverable by the right forensic methods. Four to seven passes is more like it.

For SSDs, you need to make sure that 'trimmed' sectors are also zero-written, since they'll not be written over in a standard format, as far as I know.
Click to expand...

Its fine unless someone is going to take an electron microscope over your platters. Joe Bloggs on eBaay aint gonna.

I just sold 9 drives on there and used: http://www.cezeo.com/downloads/disk-redactor.exe
 
There's also Secure Erase (the IBM tool, not the shareware software thing) - even NIST thinks that will do the trick. Host Protected Area, Device Config Overlay and the partition table. Assuming, of course, that your BIOS will let you.

I suppose whomever you're selling it to would probably be happy if you gave it some partitions back with gparted or similar afterwards.
 
The Peter "Paranoid" Gutmann way is to write over the drive 35 times.

Do that for a 2TB drive and you'll be waiting about 5 days for it to finish.
 
Gets to the point where your time and effort plus electricity and use of your system for this data scrubbing drops below the price you get selling the drive
 
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