#Secure erase mac hard drive free

But, if youвЂ™re about to dispose of the drive, thatвЂ™s fine. You wouldnвЂ™t want to do this all the time. I figure if a government wants to hack my personal info, there are a zillion other avenues they would be more successful in hacking than a 3-pass-erasure of a secondhand SSD or hard drive that had encrypted personal data.Bear in mind that solid-state storage only has a limited number of writes.В This will reduce your driveвЂ™s lifespan, especially for cheap flash drives. I also encrypt my entire drive, as well as my Time Machine backups, so I feel fairly secure regardless of what kind of erasure mode I choose. Of the key more or less instantly renders your data irretrievable in practical terms. The modern solutionДЇor quickly and securely erasing your data is strong encryption, with which mere destruction Wear-leveling, block-sparing, and possibly-persistent cache hardware.

especially in light of Apple's own warning (and likely the reason Apple removed it from the UI): NOTE: This kind of secure erase is no longer considered safe because modern devices have

but unless you're often targeted for hacking by multi-billion dollar nation states, it seems useless to me. The other options are even more secure, according to brainy hardware people.

4 - 3-pass 'DoE algorithm' erase (way slower, but better if I'm transferring the computer to someone I don't trust (e.g.

1 - Random fill (slightly better than all zeroes in most cases, but takes a little longer).

#Secure erase mac hard drive free

0 - Zero fill (good for quickly writing over all the free space).

There are a few other common options available (instead of 0) if you run man diskutil and scroll down to the secureErase section. You can see a list of all the drives connected to your Mac with ls /Volumes. This command would write zeroes on the entire 'Macintosh HD' drive. Luckily, it's still available on the command line (via Terminal.app): diskutil secureErase freespace 0 '/Volumes/Macintosh HD' But it seems to have gone missing in recent macOS versions. Instead of just formatting the drive, installing macOS, then handing it off, I want to make sure all the contents I had stored on it are irrecoverably erased (I sometimes work on projects under NDA, and I also like having some semblance of privacy in general).Дisk Utility used to expose this functionality in the UI, which made this a very simple operation. From time to time, I need to clean off the contents of a hard drive on one of my Macs-most often this is the case prior to selling the mac or giving it to someone else.