In this tutorial, I will show you how to write all zeros or ones to a disk, completing wiping the data off of the drive. This is a recommended step to secure your data when you are disposing, selling, donating, or recycling a computer.

Caution

When wiping data from disks, it's important to pay atention to avoid making accidents and causing serious headaches. Take a moment to verify commands before pressing enter and use good judgement when running these commands.

Notes

Writing all zeros to a disk is slow. Please consider that the operation may take several hours to complete.

Operating System Instructions

Windows

Open an elevated command prompt.
run diskpart
Find your disk with list disk
Select the disk with select disk x where x is the number of the drive you wish to wipe.
run clean all
Wait patently as Windows does not provide a status indicator.

MacOS

Open terminal
run diskutil list and make note of the /dev/diskX number you wish to wipe
run diskutil zerodisk /dev/diskX where X is the number gathered from the previous step

Linux

Open terminal
run lsblk to list disks
run pv < /dev/zero > /dev/<diskID> where diskID is the disk from the previous command.