Wipe WD External HDD.

[hack3rcon]

Hello.
I want Wipe Data on my WD My Passport Ultra and don't like anyone can recover it. What is your idea about "shred"? Can it OK?
I used "shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/sdXX" , Can it Enough?

Thank you.

[ellakaren]

Hello hack3rcon,

I heard about BitRaser software, is very powerful and can erase data beyond the scope of recovery. I used it for my computer that i wanted to sell, it deleted all data stored on the drives.

Check thoroughly that the data is gone and cannot be recovered. Hope this helps you.

[hack3rcon]

Hello hack3rcon,

I heard about BitRaser software, is very powerful and can erase data beyond the scope of recovery. I used it for my computer that i wanted to sell, it deleted all data stored on the drives.

Check thoroughly that the data is gone and cannot be recovered. Hope this helps you.

It just for Windows

[ellakaren]

hack3rcon,

Its not dependent on platform and can erase data from all the drives.

[day1data]

It just for Windows

Im assuming you are using OSX then. OSX has a security erase feature built in.

If you are running the latest El Capitan go to disk utility, click on the drives partition and click erase. There will be a button saying security options.

Then this box will come up.

Mac erase.png (55.33 KiB) Viewed 6048 times

You can then select how securely you want you data erased.

[labtech]

All utilities virtually do the same thing: write new data (a pattern, sometimes of your choice depending on the utility features) over the old data. So, which one per se is not so important with regard to security. Just verify. Verifying is what most people don't know how to do, because they understand how recording takes place.

[hack3rcon]

It just for Windows

Im assuming you are using OSX then. OSX has a security erase feature built in.

If you are running the latest El Capitan go to disk utility, click on the drives partition and click erase. There will be a button saying security options.

Then this box will come up.

Mac erase.png

You can then select how securely you want you data erased.

No, I'm Linux user.

[HaQue]

The you can just use dd to write all over the disk. google it.well look here http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_wipe_a_hard_drive_clean_in_Linux

Though I question some of the things such as why writing random data is better than 0's in todays modern HDD's - this tends to be a folklore, and then people that want to "prove" it refer to 15 year old case studies. IMHO if you fully write over everything with 0's, you are going to be able to recover nothing.

for example:

Due to the way hard drives are made it is often possible to determine what was written beneath the most current write operation. If you write the entire drive with zeros, it will be quite easy to see what data was written before. It will be the one that is not a zero!

This is just pure balderdash. and there is nothing to backup these claims. Many people mix up terminologies quick format, full format and writing 0's.