While, it’s not at all a difficult process, it is important to note that doing this will decrease the lifespan of your external hard drive. But if you just want to get rid of old data and start anew with a fresh amount of storage you can easily wipe your hard drive clean. If you have a growing pile of old external hard drives in your closet, it’s probably time to invest in a proper hard drive storage solution or just get rid of them entirely. Whether it’s throwing the drive into a fire pit, soaking it in diluted hydrochloric acid, or simply smashing it with a sledge hammer – your efforts can definitely be better spent wiping and disposing of your old external hard drive the right way. People do some pretty crazy things to get rid of old data and dispose of old, dead hard drives. Wiping the data requires locating the file and completely removing it.Get rid of your old external hard drive the right way. The 6 Hard Drive Disk Wiper/Wipe Software Wiping a hard drive might take many hours to days, depending on the hard disk type, software, and procedure used. If you want to permanently erase a hard drive and make the data completely unrecoverable, you can employ hard drive wipe software to erase the hard drive permanently. Even if you overwrite some new data on the hard disk, some data may remain recoverable if the new data does not take up the entire cluster space used by the old data. You can recover deleted data and files from your hard drive using data recovery software. Instead, such files remain on the hard drive, and only the data reference is removed from the allocation table, making it impossible to access. When you delete a file or folder, you click the delete option, and the file is removed from your drive however, deleting the files does not erase them from your hard drive.

The Difference Between Data Wiping and Deleting

External hard drive wiper