Looking To Secure Erase External HDD

[Carlosinfl]

I was wondering if anyone knows what program / utility will secure erase (DoD or NSA level) my external USB connected hard drive? Some utilities out on the web are bootable utilities but since this is a USB connected drive, I don't know if it would try and secure erase my actual O.S. drive rather than my target USB external disk.

Can anyone please tell me what you recommend?

 

[lizardking009]

If you're worried, unplug your internal hard drive before running the utility.

 

[Carlosinfl]

If you're worried, unplug your internal hard drive before running the utility.

I am asking for utility recommendations that people on the forums have used and found successful.

 

[InvisiBill]

If you're worried, unplug your internal hard drive before running the utility.

I am asking for utility recommendations that people on the forums have used and found successful.

And he was simply suggesting that you could unplug your internal drive to be absolutely sure that nothing would happen to it, while testing any of the well-known disk wiping programs to see if they worked on your external drive.


Eraser should work if you're running Windows. Keep in mind that doing it via USB will be slower than via SATA or IDE. Using the ATA "Secure Erase" command would be faster since it's all done internally by the drive (whereas a generic disk wiper like DBAN simply writes over everything on the disk manually), but I'm not sure if that's something that's accessible via USB either.

 

[Zanthras]

I am asking for utility recommendations that people on the forums have used and found successful.

BCWipe, ive not personally tried it on an external, but it works quite well for everything else. Its also used by the marine corp, so its going to do the job correctly.

 

[ozu]

If you have Acronis True Image, the bootable CD has a great Drive Cleanser utility with most multi-pass algorithms, or you can zero them out if you wish as well.

 

[Metaluna]

Unless you need to do this to fulfill some corporate or government security policy, I personally would just do a single pass overwrite with zeroes. I generally boot a Linux rescue cd (I like the GParted one) and do:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (replace sda with your device)


Unless you've got the nuclear launch codes, or something even more valuable like plans for the next iPhone ( ), I doubt anyone would go through the trouble to defeat that, if it's even still possible with modern drives. With all the PRML, vertical recording, etc. technology, it's a miracle these things can even store the data that you *want* to keep.

As I understand it, drives with truly sensitive data (i.e. classified) are physically destroyed (literally shredded).