Because you ain’t getting its stuff back after you do this, so be careful.Īnyway, when you click “Erase,” you’ll get some choices for your drive’s new format, partition scheme, and so on. In Disk Utility, you should see a list of both your internal and external disks in the sidebar on the left.Ĭlick on the drive you’d like to erase (not any of its indented partitions) and then click the Erase button in the toolbar.Īnd, uh…in case it needs to be said, be doubly super über sure that you’ve picked the right drive. Once it powers up and mounts in Finder, launch Disk Utility (found in the Applications > Utilities folder). To do so, plug the external drive into your Mac and connect it to power if necessary. That said, if you have an external drive that you use for data storage or backup, and one that is far more likely to still be a mechanical hard disk drive, you can and should securely erase it before giving it away or throwing it out. In fact, recent versions of Disk Utility in macOS won’t even let you initiate a secure erase of an SSD, and if you somehow manage to do it anyway, all you’ll be doing is severely damaging the longterm health and performance of your drive. This is because most Macs ship with solid state drives these days (yeah, those entry-level iMacs and Mac minis with HDDs are kind of a rip-off) and there’s no need to securely erase SSDs because they store data differently from hard drives. Our instructions here (and the title of this tip) focus on external drives. But if the data is sensitive enough, then trust me, it’s worth the wait to ensure that it will be unrecoverable. Securely erasing a drive takes a lot more time than a standard erase procedure, of course, and may take more than a day if you’re dealing with a huge multi-terabyte hard drive and a seven-pass erase setting. For most users a single pass each of 1’s and 0’s will be enough, but if your drive contains data from certain industries such as health or government, you’ll want to use the more robust levels which write up to seven passes over every sector of the drive. There are different levels of Secure Erase that increase the number of passes Disk Utility will make when writing new data to the drive. This overwrites the entire drive and makes data recovery efforts much more difficult. But if you use the Secure Erase feature, it will actually go through the drive sector-by-sector and write data to every part. Securely Erasing Your DrivesĪ way to protect yourself from having this sensitive information exposed is to use a feature called “Secure Erase.” Normally, when you use Disk Utility to erase a drive, it essentially wipes out the drive’s “table of contents” from our example earlier. This means that files you thought were gone may still be lurking on your hard drive, including tax and financial records, confidential businesses or medical information, and even things like private photographs. Unless that happens, however, those bits of data from the original file will still be on your hard drive, and may be accessible via special data recovery applications or, in more serious cases, physical analysis of the drive’s internal platters themselves. Therefore, if you delete a bunch a files and then load your Mac up with new data, there’s a good chance that your new data will need the space occupied by your deleted file and then overwrite it. It simply says “hey, this page is no longer needed, so go ahead and write new information on it when necessary.” When you delete a file, including when you Empty the Trash, your Mac essentially erases the file’s entry in the index, but doesn’t go and erase the page in the book on which the information was stored. The index tells you (the computer) exactly which page to turn to when you need a specific piece of information, but the information itself exist only on that page. Here’s a good analogy: think of your Mac’s hard drive as a book with a table of contents or index.
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