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Faster way of secure erasing an HDD?

B

Battousai01

Member
Hi guys, I will be selling my old laptop and I will be secure erasing the disk. I've sold some desktop and drives before and I have always securely erased the drives before selling, however, secure erasing a drive takes hours.

I would like to know is there a faster way of secure erasing a drive aside from overwriting them 2-3 times?

I've read that secure erasing an android phone or SSD is a lot faster, you will just need to "encrypt" the phone first then wipe the storage and then that's it. Can we also do that on a mechanical harddisk drive? If not why?

Thanks in advance for any replies.
 
Yes, you could just encrypt the drive but it would also take hours since it would rewrite all data in order to encrypt it. I.e. the end result is pretty much the same.

Typically it's enough to overwrite the whole drive just once, unless there's confidential or sensitive data in the drive.
 
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Just get a linux boot CD/DVD/pen drive, and do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M where X with the target drive letter.
That will write out random data to the drive. Yes, it will take a long time the bigger the HD is.
There is no quick way to wipe a mechanical device, without using a big degausser, and not many people have those available. Though, you might take the HD to the junk yard, that has one of those huge electric magnets, and convince them to use it... 😉
 
Elixer said:
Though, you might take the HD to the junk yard, that has one of those huge electric magnets, and convince them to use it... 😉
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Not convinced that this would work,it would probably wreak havoc to the write arm rendering the drive useless.
 
TheELF said:
Not convinced that this would work,it would probably wreak havoc to the write arm rendering the drive useless.
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Um, did you miss the 😉 at the end? That wasn't meant to be serious--though, it would erase the drive...he didn't say it must still work. 😉
 
As mentioned there really isn't a quick way sans degaussing. Enterprise drives have a quick secure erase feature that simply erases the encryption key used to encrypt the existing data on the entire drive rendering the old data on the drive unreadable but that really doesn't help you here.

Probably just encrypting it like mentioned early may be the quickest route.
 
Battousai01 said:
I've read that secure erasing an android phone or SSD is a lot faster, you will just need to "encrypt" the phone first then wipe the storage and then that's it. Can we also do that on a mechanical harddisk drive? If not why?
Click to expand...
Phones probably have 10x times less storage than your HDD, that's why it may seem faster to encrypt+wipe a phone than secure erase a HDD.
 
ATA secure erase still writes to every sector on the HD, so, it is as fast as 1 pass dban or dd or ...
So, a 4TB HD will still take ~7 hours to wipe it.
 
You just do 1-pass of zeros is all that necessary for HDD. No need for any Gutmann DOD multipass approach with pseudorandom data throwing salt over your shoulder while facing true North.
 
tcsenter said:
You just do 1-pass of zeros is all that necessary for HDD. No need for any Gutmann DOD multipass approach with pseudorandom data throwing salt over your shoulder while facing true North.
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:thumbsup:

Unless you're selling the laptop to a DEA agent and have kept records of all your drug-related transactions for the past 5 years on the HD, what are you so massively worried about, even in the unlikely event the purchaser bothered to try to recover any of your old files?

If there's any truly sensitive data - like financial records with SSNs or account numbers, or nude photos of yourself and/or loved one(s), you can just do the DoD-overkill routine on those specific files and then deal with the drive as a whole more reasonably, after all...
 
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tcsenter said:
You just do 1-pass of zeros is all that necessary for HDD. No need for any Gutmann DOD multipass approach with pseudorandom data throwing salt over your shoulder while facing true North.
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I'd just write zeros to it myself, unless you're trying to hide something from the NSA or something.
 
MustISO said:
Google ATA secure erase. Here's a tool I use:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/secure-erase.html

It's fast and very secure. The function is internal to the drive.

There are other methods and applications that do secure erase. Much better than those multi-pass programs IMO.
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That's the way I personally erase mine, a nice GUI exists called PartedMagic, a live Linux CD. Secure Erase is also the only way to go for SSD to avoid unnecessary write cycles (only the encryption key is wiped).
 
PliotronX said:
That's the way I personally erase mine, a nice GUI exists called PartedMagic, a live Linux CD. Secure Erase is also the only way to go for SSD to avoid unnecessary write cycles (only the encryption key is wiped).
Click to expand...
You do need to make the drive is capable of actually performing the action, though. (I imagine most newer ones can, but my now rather old Kingston V+100 can't, for example, as I finally figured out after spending half an hour pulling my hair out trying to figure out why it wasn't working the last time I reinstalled my OS.D🙂
 
Hi guys, just a follow-up question. I have formatted the drive of the laptop that I will be giving away, I am thinking of encrypting it before securely wiping it using DBAN. The question is, can I encrypt the whole drive that has blank space? If yes, is there a way to encrypt it using a bootable application or If that's not possible should I install an OS (i.e. Windows) first then use an encryption app to encrypt the whole drive that has mostly blank space?

Lastly, should I switch my hard drive to "IDE" mode from AHCI in the BIOS? whats the difference when using DBAN in AHCI mode and IDE mode? my laptop drive is a SATA.

Thanks in advance for any replies! 🙂
 
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Battousai01 said:
Hi guys, just a follow-up question. I have formatted the drive of the laptop that I will be giving away, I am thinking of encrypting it before securely wiping it using DBAN. The question is, can I encrypt the whole drive that has blank space? If yes, is there a way to encrypt it using a bootable application or If that's not possible should I install an OS (i.e. Windows) first then use an encryption app to encrypt the whole drive that has mostly blank space?

Lastly, should I switch my hard drive to "IDE" mode from AHCI in the BIOS? whats the difference when using DBAN in AHCI mode and IDE mode? my laptop drive is a SATA.

Thanks in advance for any replies!
Click to expand...

You should read this article. It pretty much answers every single question you've asked so far.
 
Yeah, a "write zeros" operation over the entire drive should do it. Even an "NTFS full format" with Vista or newer should work.
 
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