Gaming PC

How to Secure Erase an SSD or HDD Before Selling It or Your PC

If you’re selling or gifting an old PC or just the internal drive, you should securely erase your SSD or hard drive to prevent the next person from accessing your files. Needless to say at this point, simply deleting a file doesn’t make it disappear completely. The operating system removes the pointers to the files and leaves every bit of it until the drive needs space for new data and overwrites it. But that can take years and never happens if you have a lot of free space.

You might think that just resetting Windows 10 or 11 with the option to delete your files enabled would remove all your personal data, but it’s not, we’ve done the tests to prove it. I was preparing to donate an old Windows 10 PC, so I used the built-in Windows Reset feature,[すべて削除]clicked. This will remove all files and leave the factory default installation of the OS.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

After the reset process was complete, my personal files were practically wiped, as was all the software I had installed.However, after installing and running EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free (opens in new tab)I found all the old files using the Find and Undo File utility. To prove my point, I restored a file called mypasswords2.txt that was in my Documents folder and was able to read everything in it.

Find Deleted Files with EaseUS Data Recovery

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Even if you sell your computer or bare drive to the nicest person, you can’t believe they don’t know the deleted files they can recover. I’ll explain how and how to do the same for hard drives as the process is a little different.

How to securely erase an SSD

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