As a data storage device, hard drives have recorded many cherished past years for us in our daily lives. If you need to discard the hard drive you have used for some special reasons, the importance of clearing the hard drive data cannot be ignored. After all, no one wants their private data to be obtained by someone with evil intentions, right?
So before we discard the abandoned hard disk, how should we destroy the hard disk data and make it unrecoverable? A simple formatting operation is not advisable. We also need to adopt a more secure and effective way to completely erase the data.
Why is formatting undesirable?
For ordinary people, when deleting data, they usually choose the formatting operation. You think that formatting can completely delete the data. In fact, this is not the case. The system is a very lazy guy, and it will not perform the deletion operation honestly.
When you delete a piece of data through formatting, the system will only mark it as unoccupied and will not actually delete it. As shown in the figure below, when we delete the data in area 3 At that time, it will only be marked as an unoccupied space. However, in fact, the disktool data in this area has not changed (most data recovery software on the market is also based on this principle to achieve data recovery purposes). Wait until later This space marked as unoccupied will be overwritten only when new data needs to be written.
So how to destroy hard disk data so that it cannot be recovered? We share with you 2 simple and effective methods below. You can choose a more suitable hard drive data clearing solution according to your actual situation!
Option 1: Physical destruction
Now that you are planning to lose your hard drive, what are you still worried about? Just let yourself go, pick up the hammer and hit it, giving it a heavy blow that cannot be recovered from the physical level. In addition, you can also choose to burn the hard disk in a flame, wait for its temperature to rise, then take it out and immediately put it into cold water. After experiencing the torture of ice and fire, I believe that no matter how skilled the data recovery expert is, he will There is nothing you can do!
Method 2: Overwrite data
Some people may think that the above method of completely destroying hard disk data is a bit simple, rude, and insulting to politeness, so please don't miss the following method.
We mentioned above that the formatting method does not work, so how can we completely clear the data on the hard drive and make it unrecoverable? Writing data repeatedly to the hard drive is a good solution. However, it is a bit troublesome to manually copy and paste data to the hard drive. Therefore, in order to help you more easily overwrite data on the hard drive to clear the data, we need to use a more professional disk erasure tool - AOMEI Backup. It can help us repeatedly overwrite 0 or random number data into the selected data block area, thereby completely overwriting the hard disk data and making the data almost impossible to recover.
We understand that different users may have different data erasure needs, so AOMEI Backup thoughtfully provides you with 4 different hard drive data erasure solutions. You can choose according to your actual situation when performing the erasure task. The erasure method you need:
Write 0 to all sectors: Perform a write 0 operation to all sectors in the hard disk you want to delete, which is very fast and safer.
Write random numbers to all sectors: Perform a random number writing operation to all sectors in the hard disk you want to delete, which is faster and safer.
DoD 5220.22-M: U.S. Department of Defense data erasure standard, performs 1 to 7 overwrite operations (you can choose) on all sectors in the hard disk you want to delete. It is slow and safe.
Gutmann: Perform 35 overwrite operations on all sectors of the hard disk you want to delete. It is very slow and very safe.
Doesn't it look good? Then please download and install AOMEI Backup, and then follow our demonstration tutorial to learn how to completely destroy hard drive data to avoid the possibility of recovery!
Step 1. Connect the hard drive you want to erase to your computer and make sure the system can detect it, then open AOMEI Backup and click "Tools" > "Disk Wipe" in the main interface.
Step 2. Select the erasure type you want according to your needs. You can select "Erase partitions or unallocated space in the disk" or "Erase Disk". Here we take "Erase Disk" as an example, and then click Click "Next".
Step 3. Select the hard drive you want to erase (all partitions on the selected hard drive will be deleted and all data on it erased, and the data cannot be recovered after erasing), and then click "Next".
Step 4. Select the erasure method you want to use. The "DoD 5220.22-M" method is basically safe enough. However, if you want to erase data more thoroughly and don't care about time, you can also consider selecting "Gutmann". "35 random number overwrite and erase methods. After selecting, click "Start" to start overwriting data to perform the hard disk data erasure task.
