Wipe External Hard Drive
Best way to wipe external hard disk
External hard disk is a storage device in which you can store numbers of files in it. Sometime you wanted to erase files from your drive & want to get rid of it as it is taking unnecessary space & so that you can store new files in it. The deleting process is easy & quick to remove unwanted files from the external HDD but do you think that files are gone forever??? No, files that you have deleted from disk are not permanently erased they can be retrieved back by using good recovery software.
External HDD can store files of about 1TB which can work on Windows & Mac machine as well. You can store files of different file formats with utmost ease. You may think of deleting a file using “Shift + Delete” emptying Recycle Bin, formatting, re-formatting the drive. But the true fact is that the information of the file is not destroyed physically, they are just flagged as deleted by Operating System. Though it can be recovered by using recovery software before overwriting the space, it is better to wipe the external HDD to remove the files forever. This process of wiping drive will help you when you are going to sell or dispose your external HDD. The memory assigned to that erased file exists so hackers or any criminal minded people can access confidential information from memory. So erasing a file from drive will not provide security to prevent important information from being misused.
Now a question may come to your mind that how to wipe external hard disk…Well there is a solution of this. Nowadays, many wiping tools are found in internet you can download any of them & then perform wiping process by buying them or downloading trial versions. But before using any such software beware of choosing the right software because using untrusted or unreliable software to save money may severely damage your external HDD. So to perform such process you should prefer software recommended by high professionals.
Wipe Disk tool is the prominent software to wipe external HDD which has a wonderful wiping algorithm to wipe files from the disk. It has nine shredding patterns with the help of which it wipes the drive by overwriting the drive with garbage or junk values. The nine shredding patterns are listed below:
- Fast Zero Overwrite
- Random Overwrite
- US Navy, NAVSO P-5239-26_RLL
- US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M)_DOD Standard 5220.28 STD
- North Atlantic Treaty Organization_NATO standard
- Peter Gutmann Secure Deletion
- German:VSITR-US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M)
- Gutmann Method
Wipe disk software also wipes sensitive data from physical and logical drives. This utility lets you to shred files from your external HDD making it impossible to restore deleted files. It makes wiping process easy for the users as all the steps are mentioned very clearly mentioned with screenshots. You can also perform this process to wipe disk on memory cards, USB drives, hard drives & also other storage devices. Moreover, this software has various features so that it can wipe Sandisk memory card and memory cards of all other brands that are available in the market.
Follow the simple steps to wipe extrenal HDD:
Step 1: Download & install the software on your system and then launch it to wipe external hard drive. On the main window you need to select external hard disk & proceed to the next step.
Figure 1: Main Screen
Step 2: Select any one shredding patterns that matches the scenario and start the wiping process.
Figure 2: Select Wiping Method
Step 3: After wiping process is over, a message will be displayed on the screen stating completion of the wiping process
Figure 3: Wiping External Hard Drive
