How to Wipe an External Hard Drive Without Using Recovery Options on Windows 10 or Mac

Updated by

Tracy King 

Written by

Linda 

Last updated on April 19, 2024

There are many reasons you might want to wipe an external hard drive. You might be looking to free up space, reset the drive with a different file system, or deal with an old drive. If you have an external hard drive that you no longer need, you can dispose of it in a number of ways, such as donating it, giving it to a friend, selling it, or even physically destroying it.

Regardless of your choice, you need to erase the external hard drive first. That's the only way to ensure that your data won't be recovered by any data recovery software and that you're not at risk of a privacy breach. On this page, we'll show you a few quick methods to help you erase an external hard drive on both Windows 10 and macOS. Let's get started.

How to Wipe an External Hard Drive in Windows 10

Wiping or sanitizing a hard drive is an effective way to permanently delete data that can't be recovered. While Windows doesn't offer a tool to scan and wipe external hard drives, there are still a few methods you can use to get the job done.

Method 1: Wipe External Hard Drive with Windows 10 Built-in Tools

We recommend you try first with the built-in Windows 10 Disk Management tool, the easiest way to erase a hard drive, SSD, or external drive.

As an excellent disk partition tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional provides the "Wipe Data" feature to permanently delete all data on the hard drive in Windows 10/8/7. It can help you wipe out all data and partitions on the hard drive with methods compliant with DoD 5220.22-M erasure standard. Generally, after two wipes, your data will be permanently erased and cannot be recovered anymore.

Note: Before you proceed with erasing the external hard drive, make sure you have backed up all your important data to another drive.

Step 1: Connect the external device to your computer and right-click on it. Choose "Wipe Disk."

Select "Wipe disk"

Step 2: Choose the number of times you want to overwrite the data (up to 10 times). Then click OK.

Select the time

Step 3: Click Run 1 Task, and then click Apply.

Method 2: Erase External Hard Drive on Windows 10 Using CMD

If you're tech-savvy, you can also use CMD to wipe an external hard drive. However, for beginners, we still recommend using a user-friendly data erasure tool for the job.

Step 1: In Windows 10 or 8.1, right-click the Start button, or press Windows logo key + X, and select Command Prompt (Admin).

On Windows 7, open the Start menu and search for cmd. Right-click the “Command Prompt” shortcut that appears, then select “Run as administrator.”

Step 2. Clean the external hard drive with Diskpart. In the CMD window, type the commands one by one and hit Enter after each:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # (# being the number of your external hard drive)
clean or clean all

If everything worked, you'll see the message "DiskPart successfully cleaned the disk." This will erase all data on the external hard drive.

How to Erase an External Hard Drive on a Mac

For Mac users looking to wipe an external hard drive for free, here's one approach to try.

Step 1: Connect the external drive to your Mac.

Step 2. Open the “Applications” folder in the Finder, and then launch Disk Utility.

Step 3: In the “Storage Media Management” window, select the external hard drive you want to erase. Click the “Erase” button.

Step 4: Click on “Security Options,” and then slide the bar to the right and position it at “DoE 3-Pass Secure Erase.”

Step 5: Click “Erase” to securely erase the drive.

Abstract

With the methods above, you can easily and securely wipe an external hard drive on Windows 10 and macOS. On Windows 10/8/7, you can use Partition Master to manage and make the best use of your disks.

In addition to disk erasing, Disk Management also provides more basic and advanced disk partitioning features, such as resizing/moving partitions to solve low disk space issues, converting disk/partition, creating WinPE bootable disk, partition recovery, SSD 4K alignment, etc. Download and have a try now.

More about formatting external hard drives

If you have any of these common questions about hard drive erasure, you can find the answers here.

How do I erase everything from my hard drive?

Wipe the disk to delete everything permanently.

The only way to delete data from your HDD, SSD, external hard drive, SD card, or USB flash drive is to wipe the device.

Deleting a file or formatting a disk does not completely erase it, and the data can still be recovered from your hard drive with specialized software.

2. Can data be recovered from a wiped hard drive?

No, a wiped hard drive cannot be recovered.

A data erasure tool overwrites the storage areas of the hard drive with the same data, usually in zero-fill mode. Once an overwrite is executed, data recovery software cannot retrieve those files. If you set the overwrite pass to 10, data recovery solutions won't be able to retrieve the information.

3. Formatting Data vs. Erasing Data

Formatting can be low-level (physical, usually done by the manufacturer) or high-level, which users can perform on their computers. High-level formatting simply clears the FAT (File Allocation Table), which makes the system think that the disk is empty without actually wiping it. Data can often be recovered from a quickly formatted hard drive with data recovery tools.

Read also: How to Format Hard Drive for Free

Hard drive data erasure refers to the process of completely removing data from a hard drive using specific data erasure techniques and standards, such as the DoD 5220.22-M erasure standard. After performing a full overwrite and zero-fill erase on the hard drive, it is currently impossible for professional data recovery companies to restore the information, thus effectively ensuring the security and privacy of the data.