permanently wipe files from hdd

[katka]

So I have 2 laptop HDD's that I used to have important files on them (from banking accounts, passwords to work related stuff etc) that I normally wiped using the FORMAT function in windows.

Now after we stopt working from home, I no longer need these HDD's, therefore I want to sell them. Their health is in great condition, no bad sectors or stuff like that BUT before I sell them I want to know if there's a good method to format them in order for the people I'm selling them to cant recover some of the files I had in there since I know there are several softwares that can do things like that.

Any advice? thanks.

[MiszS]

tbh even with full format (not the quick one that just deletes paths), its still possible to recover the data, so i wouldn't recommend selling them, especially considering that you wont get much for them anyway, id just use them for backup if i were you

[mMontana]

If your computer is not "that" new, https://dban.org/

Otherwise...

https://slashdot.org/software/p/DBAN/alternatives

A slashdot-cured list of alternatives (which contains also the buyer of ban)

[manikyath]

back when i refurbished computers at work our procedure was a few passes of writing zero's, then a pass of randoms, and then another pass of zero's. we'd do more passes of randoms, but the system we wiped with slowed down significantly making pseudo-random numbers.

 

but really.. for a somewhat modern HDD a few rounds of writing garbage across the entire disk is enough to make it not feasible to recover any data.