Need to wipe data on hard drive or SSD?
“I need to sell my old Samsung SSD but i need to wipe it completely, i'm wondering if formatting can erase data completely without recovery? please advise!”
“Hey guys i bought a laptop that I have to return, but I want to first wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows. What would be the best program to do this? I know there is a lot of options but which would be best.”
From the user stories above, we can know that many users need to wipe data from HDD or SSD for different reasons. Some simple operation, like formatting disk partition is not safe enough since the data just becomes invisible to operating system, not removed forever. If you don’t want your personal data to be exposed to anyone elsem, you need to completely wipe all data from the target disks.
Data wipe software - AOMEI Partition Assistant
To completely wipe a hard drive and ensure no one can recover them in any methods, you can use a powerful hard drive manager-AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It is a partition manager designed for Windows operating systems, such as Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows 8 and so on.
It provides a feature named "Wipe Hard Drive". It enables you to overwrite a hard drive with 4 wiping methods: zero-filling, filling sectors with random data, DOD wipe, and Gutmann. Besides, due to different ways of storing, this wiping way is not applied to erase an SSD, and has negative affect on lifespan of an SSD.
So AOMEI Partition Assistant offers another option: SSD Secure Erase is specially for solid-state drive. It is able to erase all data on a SSD without decreasing its lifespan.
How to wipe data on hard drive in Windows 10, 8, 7?
Before you do
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Backup data which you don’t want to wipe from the disk you are going to erase.
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A disk will become blank as soon as it has been wiped, by doing so, you can make the full use of this disk by re-partition it.
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If you need to wipe the system hard drive, you ask to restart into PreOS mode, or you can make a bootable device and do the clean in Windows PE mode.
Steps to erase data from hard drive completely
Step 1. This feature will erase a given hard drive to anti-recovery. You can select a hard drive which you want to wipe; right-click on it and choose "Wipe Hard Drive" option.
Step 2. Choose a wiping method to wipe the selected hard drive according to your requirements and click "OK".
Note:
● Fill sectors with Zeros: Overwrite all sectors with zeros. It is common to wipe a personal hard drive. It is safe and fast.
● Fill sectos with random data: It overwrites hard drive with random data. It is more secure than the first one.
● DoD 5220.22-M: DoD standard is firstly pubilished in Department of Defense of the U.S. It is much secure than "zero-filling" and "random data filling" and faster than the Guttman. Thus it is often adopted by companies and organizations.
Gutmann: It overwrites a hard drive with 35 passes. It is the safest way here, but it also takes the longest time.
Step 3. Click "Apply" in the tool bar to execute the operation.
How to secure erase SSD in Windows 7?
As we know, SSD has different reading and writing ways to traditional hard drive, which makes its wipe-out measures different. AOMEI Partition Assistant is also an Samsung SSD secure erase utility that helps you to clear data completely on a solid-state drive in Windows 7 PC. So If you are working with other Windows system, you need to connect it to a Windows 7 based computer with SATA. Here are the steps below:
Step 1: Connect the SSD to a Windows 7 computer and make sure it is recognized by Windows 7. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, right click the SSD drive and select “SSD Secure Erase” .
Step 2: Choose the SSD you’ll erase from the list. Double click the SSD will display its specific information.
Step 3: At “SSD identification information” page, you may find the SSD is in a frozen state which set to ensure no one can modify your drive settings. Perform a hot swap to release this restriction.
How to perform a Hot Swap?
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First, open computer case, rear cover or drive shell and find out the SSD you’ll erase.
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Second, unplug the power cable and then disconnect the SATA data cable from SSD.
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Finally, after a few seconds, reconnect the SATA cable to the SATA port and then plug the power cable back to complete the hot-swap.
Step 4: Now, click "Next" to start wipe all data on SSD drive completely. Mostly, the erasing process will be done in a short time.
Note:
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Once the wipe operation is carried out by AOMEI Partition Assistant, the data will not be recovered by any data recovery software, so use with caution.
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AOMEI Partition Assistant is not a file-level wipe software but a sector-level one. So, you can only use AOMEI Partition Assistant to wipe partition/disk. After a partition/disk has been wiped, all the files on it will be erased simultaneously. If you do need to wipe a specific file, then you have to download a file-level wipe software.
Conclusion
No matter what type of disk you want to wipe data on, AOMEI Partition Assistant does a great job in clearing data on hard drive and SSD disk. Apart from wiping data on these disks, it also provides “Quick Partition” feature for user to multi-partition hard drive or SSD in one click.