To securely erase data, hard disk drives fill the occupied space on the drive with a file consisting of zeroes or execute multiple writes of different characters. When the command completes, verify the disk has been wiped.Note that spindle disk drives will take considerably longer (hours) to complete. In testing, the average time for SECURITY ERASE completion was less than two minutes for a 256GB SSD.
Hdparm -user-master u -security-erase NULL /dev/sdX
Generic ssd utility software password#
In this case, the password is set to NULL.
The default options should work, click the “Erase” button to wipe the container and securely sanitize the disk.When the physical disk has been selected, click the “Erase” button. In this particular example, the Physical disk is “Seagate Expansion Media”. To securely sanitize data on the disk, the entire container must be deleted. To delete the container, select the Physical disk from the Sidebar.Container disk3 = Logical container disk.Seagate Expansion Media = Physical disk.It is important to understand that simply reformatting the encrypted Volume is not enough. After confirming the disk is encrypted, the disk can be reformatted.If the machine does not have a removable hard drive, ETS recommends encrypting the disk first, and then proceeding with this guide. Verify that the target volume is encrypted with FileVault by selecting the volume from the Sidebar and viewing its details. If you find that the volume is not encrypted, you may want to use one of the “ Alternative Methods” for securely erasing data below.To display physical disks and containers, click the “ Sidebar” menu and select “ Show All Devices“. By default, Disk Utility only displays available volumes. APFS and HFS+ encrypted volumes are housed within a logical “container” disk within the physical disk’s available space.You must connect the target disk to another machine via target disk mode, USB dock, or opt to use Internet Recovery to perform the following steps. This guide assumes that you are not booted to the disk that you’re attempting to securely erase.
macOS 10.12 or higher is required for Disk Utility to see APFS formatted volumes.