Free Software To Erase HD's & SSD's Before Off To Recycle Center

I have a bunch of HD's and SSD's that I want to get rid of along with old PC's and other electronics.

I don't want to pay someone to guarantee me they will destroy the drives. Other than watching them put the drives through a shredder who knows what really happens to them.

What is a reliable free software that will erase data from a HD and SSD and make that data totally unrecoverable?

I used to use


But have not had to use anything in years

I'm not sure they do ssd.... I used it for disks

The freeist is built in CMD utilties. You'll need a spare system because overwriting the drive takes a long time. Connect the drive you wish to overwrite. Go to a CMD prompt w/Admin. Using DISKPART select the drive you want to modify/erase and initially type the CLEAN command, which will remove all partitions on the drive. Just make sure you're at the correct drive. Next use the Format command with the /P:<count> command. The /P tells Format to overwrite the drive <count> number of times it's overwritten.

While it takes a real lot of time to erase data on a HDD or SSD, I always destroy them mechanicalley.

HDDs I take apart and make crashes on each surface or bend them if they are of metal. If glass it is very risky to bend it, because it bursts to all sides.
The magnets of the HDD often are usable for other purposes, like putting on a screwdriver to hold screws. Last time they were glued, not very usable any more, because they break when taking out..

SSD I take the board out of the cover (if any) and put the main chips in a vice, that I then screw very tight. Besides that I cut the connections of the chips here and there.

Kees said:

The magnets of the HDD often are usable for other purposes,

Click to expand...

I like that they are very strong magnets for their size.

A lot of BIOS/UEFI firmware has a secure erase option now. If you can find a machine with that, put the drives in there, and Bob’s your uncle.

cat /dev/random > file1
cat /dev/random > file2
And then after some time cat file* > cat file3 and so on. Works like a charm for smaller drives and ssd.

I smash them to smithereens using a lump hammer which is therapeutic

Some old HDD's can be useful to give to organisations for archiving stuff etc -- old HDD's are fine for this type of stuff. In the digital age much useful stuff is lost forever because it's simply thrown away. Just look at the number of great early TV programs up to the mid 1970's which were irretrievably lost -- some Brit viewers might remember that excellent Doomwatch series (very relevant today with landfill, toxic waste, climate change etc etc) where unfortunately most episodes were lost -- I believe that the (Free) TV channel Talking Pictures TV which specializes in old movies etc managed to get a few surviving episodes from someone in Canada as the BBC had wiped most of their episodes. Love thosde old 1970's hair styles and those scarf things used as mens ties !!!--very Old School "Carnaby Street".



Simply get ANY program (loads on the web) that does physical writes (I mean physical writes independent of the host OS's file system) that either writes x'00' on every physical clustor / sector etc or a random hex digit. After 2 or 3 passes of that even the military would have a problem uncovering any residual data on the device. A typical decent charity wouldn't have time, resources or even the inclination to do that anyway.

Cheers
jimbo