How to Wipe a Storage Drive – Delete All Personal Files Permanently Before Giving It Away? Best Way!!

How to Wipe a Storage Drive ? Do you have an old laptop, storage drive laying around? By selling it or giving it to someone, you can free up space in your home, maybe make some money, and extend its useful life by delaying the inevitable one-way trip to the local landfill.

When preparing a PC for reuse, the best place to start is by booting from the Windows installation media, removing any existing hard drive partitions, and then performing a fresh install. This option removes any existing personal files, but does not clean the hard drive. Therefore, it is possible for someone with advanced technical skills to use forensic tools or data recovery software to access some of the deleted information.

When is it Necessary to Wipe a Storage Drive?

• Sometimes Law Enforcement and Government agencies need to permanently delete data
• The material in the drive is very sensitive and must be erased forever.
• Before selling a storage drive, perform a secure erase of all data on the device.
• You must remove any unknown virus or malware on a USB flash drive.
• Change the file system format, for example from FAT32 to NTFS or from NTFS to exFAT or Ext4.

Most common Manual or Default Methods to Erase Data from Storage Drives – How to do

On modern systems with solid state drives, you can often find a management utility that includes a secure wipe command. For Samsung SSDs, use the Samsung Magician program. For Intel SSDs, download and install the Intel Memory and Storage Tool. Crucial SSDs use the Crucial Storage Executive utility. Microsoft Surface devices support a custom tool called Microsoft Surface Data Eraser.

You can also use Windows built-in encryption tools to ensure that the entire system drive, including unused space, is encrypted before performing a clean install. This additional step takes a little longer, but ensures that all data recovered from anywhere on the drive is unreadable. And you don’t need any third party software to get the job done.

Possibilities of Manual Encryption Methods

The system drive is fully encrypted by default if you are logged into Windows with a Microsoft account on a modern device that supports BitLocker Device Encryption (BDE). To verify that your device supports BDE, run the System Information Tool (Msinfo32.exe) as an administrator and check the Device Encryption Support entry at the bottom of the System Summary page.

On a system running Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro, you can use the Manage BitLocker utility (type BitLocker in the search box to find it) to encrypt the system drive and all data drives. Make sure you choose the option to encrypt the entire drive and not just the space that currently contains the data.

If Device Encryption is not available, open a command prompt with the Run as administrator option and enter this command:

Cipher /W:C:\

That command “zeroes out” unused disk space, overwriting it so that it can’t be recovered. This process can take a long time, so consider letting it run overnight while you concentrate on more important tasks.

How to Wipe a Storage Drive with a trustable automated tool? Which is the best data deletion tool for government, organizations, law enforcement agencies, and personal use ?

Data Destruction Software for Law-Enforcement and Government Agencies

We can see there are multiple tools are accessible on the internet for the purpose of eliminating data. However, you must select one that is completely safe and secure to download. We’d recommend BitRecover BitWipe Wizard, one of the most popular file erasure software. It is a do-it-yourself application that effectively deletes current and abolish data (deleted or formatted), including internet searches, history, system, and application traces. We ensure you that this application will wipe your data from USB Drive completely in some moments. So, just download the software to completely wipe any storage device.

Download Free BitWipe Tool for Windows From below link:

Download the BitWipe Tool free trial for Mac from below link:

How to Wipe a Storage Drive – Key Features of the Tool

• Quick, safe, secure and Powerful data erasing software
• Securely erases sensitive & confidential data across drives, devices & platforms
• Erases loose hard drives, pendrive, memory card, etc.
• Erases all major drive types such as – SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, USB, etc.
• Supports 10 global erasure standards such as MFM, DoD, RLL, NATO, etc.
• Personalized erasure approaches: Date range, Mask for File, Overwrite Data Text

Different Wipe Standards

• Zero (1 Pass)
• Random (1 Pass)
• Wipe File – Simple (1 Pass)
• Zero & Random (2 Passes)
• Random & Zero (2 Passes)
• Wipe File – Medium (2 Passes)
• US Navy – MFM (3 Passes)
• US Navy – RLL (3 Passes)
• US DoD / US Air Force (3 Passes)
• Microsoft Cipher (3 Passes)
• Bit Toggle (4 Passes)
• Wipe File – Secure (4 Passes
• NATO Standard (7 Passes
• Peter Gutmann (35 Passes)

Why BitWipe is the Best Data Eraser Tool in the Market?

BitRecover is one of the best data recovery service providers and this data cleaning software is one of the key products of the brand. So we can guess the quality !! Disk overwrite standard (erasing method) to completely erase data. Overwriting a hard disk drive (HDD) is the easiest and cheapest way to erase data without damaging it. But how many overwrite passes are enough? Or to put it another way, how many times will you write one, zero, or other junk data onto a hard drive until it’s completely erased? You can do it easily with this professional disk cleaning utility.

How to Erase Storage Data with Military Grade Data Erasure ?

Military-Grade data wiping modes are the best method to erase data without fingerprints. There are various methods of destruction used in the military and naval fields. Some popular military cleaning techniques are US DOD (5220.22-m) Pass, NIST 800-88, Write Zero Pass, Random Data Pass, US Navy – MFM Pass, US Navy – RLL, US Air Force, NATO Standard (7 Passes) and Peter Gutmann (35 Passes).

How to Wipe Storage Data with Enterprise Data Erasure Software ?

The shredding methods used in this tool are guaranteed high-level safe methods. Therefore, this tool is also used by companies, organizations, institutions and government secret services to permanently erase data securely.

Best DoD 3 Pass Data Destruction Tool

The “DoD Standard” which refers to DoD 5220.22-M Wiping Standard is a commonly used term in the data cleansing industry. When vendors claim that their solutions meet the DoD 5220.22-M “standard”, it usually means that their software writes to all addressable disk locations with one character, its complement, and a random character. So a check has to take place. This “3 step” procedure is intended to prevent data recovery using commercially available methods. This tool is the best DoD Wipe Software.

No.1 Hard Drive Wipe Software for Storage Devices

BitWipe Disk Cleanup Tool is an expert-recommended tool to permanently erase digital data without leaving a fingerprint. This data cannot be recovered using any of the recovery or carving tools. It is #1 on the market because of the data destruction standards used in this utility.

More Passes for the Best Result

Another important thing to keep in mind when choosing military-grade data wiping mode or a multi-pass wiping method, the larger the number of steps, the more data will be securely wiped and the longer the process will take to complete.

Data Eraser from a Trusted Brand

An innovation by BitRecover, the global data care experts trusted by millions. Also it is one of the trusted brands on the market dealing with data recovery, email migration and other data security tools. This makes the BitRecover BitWipe utility reliable and safe to use.

24×7 Customer Service

BitRecover’s client support is one of the laudable points that helps users to solve their technical problems. If you have any questions or concerns about BitWipe, you can contact customer support 24/7.

Also Read: How to Permanently Delete Files from a Computer?

How to Erase a Storage Drive with a Simple Automated Tool?

How to Wipe a Storage Drive? Check out the simple steps to clean storage device drive completely

1. Install and Run BitWipe Wizard Utility in your system.

2. Now select “Files and Folders” if you want to access specific files and folders; Otherwise, select “Logical Drives”.

3. Then, next, select Wipe Options and choose Free Space if you want to wipe only the free space on the drive or All Space if you want to wipe the drive completely.

4. After that, select the drives you want to wipe data from by clicking on the “Drives” option. Then click the Next button to continue.

5. After that, the toolbox appears with the data selected, select the folders and files you want to delete and click Next.

6. After that, select “Filter Options” to delete specific files and apply the filter.

7. Then, select the erasing technique that suits your needs from the drop-down menu.

8. Finally, Press the Wipe button; a warning is displayed; Click the Yes icon again

This is it. Fixed deleting a query “How to Wipe a Storage Drive?” completely on a storage drive.

We Come to The End

In this post, we’ve discussed why it’s important to thoroughly clean a storage device. We have provided the best and easiest to use DIY program to help you get this job done quickly and effortlessly. The recommended program allows users to completely erase a storage drive on Windows without encountering any difficulties. The interface of this application is extremely intuitive. This task is easily completed by both tech savvy and non-tech savvy users alike. With this utility you can clean up data from many storage devices such as HDD, SDD, Pendrive, Flash Drive, etc. permanently.