How to Easily Wipe Secondary Hard Drive

When should I Completely Wipe a Hard Drive?

Now, more and more users have the need to wipe the disk, so under what circumstances do we need to completely wipe a hard drive?

Mainly divided into the following situations.

• The first is that when you need to sell or throw away a computer, be sure to wipe your hard drive to prevent data from being stolen by others.
• The second situation is when your hard drive has been damaged and you need to replace the hard drive. While damaged hard drives may be unusable, there is still the possibility that someone can recover data from them and use them for identity theft, etc.
• The third case is that you need to upgrade the hard drive to a solid-state drive. After upgrading from a hard drive (HDD) to a solid-state drive (SDD) and migrating data to the new drive, wipe your old drive if you plan to give it away or dispose of it.

Why Need to Wipe Secondary Hard Drive?

Some users will choose to delete the data on the hard disk or format to clean up the data. But there is still a big risk in this way. If you want to completely wipe data to prevent your own data from being leaked, wiping the disk is the best way.

In a hard disk, files are stored on the surface of a magnetic and spinning platter. When a disk reads or writes data, your hard drive turns the magnetic field on the platter's surface to a 1 or 0. All data on the hard drive is ultimately saved as basic binary data. Erasing data removes binary data by overwriting zeros and ones with new data. Once a file's binary data has been changed and overwritten with new data, it cannot be retrieved.

Some professional disk-wiping software can fill drives sector by sector with zero or random data, ensuring that no data can be retrieved from the wiped disk.

How to Wipe Secondary Hard Drive

After understanding the reason, if you want to know how to completely erase the secondary hard drive, a professional disk erasing software AOMEI Backupper Professional can help you solve the problem. It can help you clean up all data from secondary hard drive easily and safely.

You can choose to erase the entire disk, selected partitions or unallocated space according to your needs, and you can guarantee that the data after erasing will not be restored again.

It allows you to wipe any kind of disk, internal/external hard drive, USB drive, SSD/HDD (WD, Crucial, Samsung, Seagate, etc.), and SD card, etc., whether they are data drives or system drives.

It provides 4 erasing methods, including fill sectors with 0, fill sectors with random data, DoD 52220.22-M and Gutmann.

It can run on all Windows operating systems, including Windows 11/10/8/7/Vista/XP, etc.

You will also need to prepare the following before erasing the disk.

• You can make a backup of the secondary hard drive before erasing, as the files will not be recoverable after this process is completed.
• Download and install this reliable disk-wiping software on your PC.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Backupper, and click Tools > Disk Wipe.

Step 2. On the Select your desired wiping type page, choose Wipe Disk and click Next.

Step 3. Select the secondary hard drive with Windows on it and click Next. You will be prompted the operation needs to be executed in reboot mode, click OK to confirm.

Step 4. On the Wiping Method page, choose Fill sectors with Zero to wipe all data on the disk and click Start to proceed.

Notes: There are four methods available.

Fill sectors with Zero (Safe, Quick)   

Fill sectors with random data (Safe, Quick)

DoD 5220.22-M (Very Safe, Slow)

Gutmann (35 passes, Very Safe, Very Slow)

Summary

This article explains when you should wipe a disk and why just deleting and formatting is not enough, wiping a disk is the best way to protect your data from being leaked. The professional disk erasing software AOMEI Backupper Professional can help you erase secondary hard drive safely. It supports various methods of disk wiping. You can choose to use the software to erase the entire disk, selected partitions or unallocated space, and the data will not be recovered after erasing.

In addition, AOMEI Backupper also provides a variety of useful functions to protect your data in an all-round way, such as system backup, system restore, recovery environment, creating a bootable disk, etc. You can download this software to explore more functions.