Best Ways on How to Wipe an External Hard Drive

Thoroughly clear external hard drive data to erase data or reuse the drive? This article will describe how to use the command line tool diskpart and the partition management software MiniTool Partition Wizard to wipe external hard disks.

Why do you need to safely erase external hard drives?

Erase disk is a process of completely deleting all data on disk, making it impossible to recover through traditional or professional data recovery techniques, usually for data security and privacy reasons. For example, when you plan to discard or sell a used external hard drive, erasing the disk ensures that files on it are permanently deleted to prevent personal files or work information from being leaked. Additionally, erasing disks may also be used to free up disk space. While most users usually choose to delete files or format partitions to clear disk space, some users prefer to wipe disk directly.

In short, erasing your hard drive is an important security measure to ensure that your data is not at risk of being compromised. In the next section, we will explain how to erase a hard drive on a Windows 11/10/8/7 system.

Notice:

How to erase an external hard drive for reuse?

Method 1: Use CMD to clean the external hard drive

The easiest way to clean up external disks is to use the built-in diskpart tool for Windows. The steps are as follows:

Before operation, use a USB cable to connect an external hard drive to your computer.

Step 1. Type cmd in the Windows search box and select the Run as administrator option from the right panel.

Step 2. Type the following command line and press Enter after each command.

• diskpart
• list disk
• select disk # ( # represents the number of the external hard drive)
• clean all

Method 2: Use MiniTool Partition Wizard to erase external hard drives

If the "clean all" command line of diskpart does not work, or you receive the error message "DiskPart encountered an error", you can choose to use the MiniTool Partition Wizard to wipe the external hard drive. This is a powerful partition management software that helps you erase disks and perform other disk management operations such as disk formatting, disk cloning, disk conversion, disk error checking, and more.

Now, connect the external hard drive to your computer and start erasing the disk.

Step 1. Download, install and start MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.

Step 2. Select the external hard drive and click the Erase Disk option in the menu bar on the left.

Step 3. In the new window, select an erase method and click OK .

Step 4. Click the Apply button in the lower left corner to start erasing the disk.

Method 3: Erase external disks through MiniTool System Booster

Alternatively, you can choose to wipe external hard drives using MiniTool System Booster. It is the best computer optimization software that can help you erase hard drives, speed up CPU/RAM, fix system problems, clean up junk files, and more.

MiniTool System Booster offers a trial version that allows you to enjoy its features for 15 days for free.

How to use this software to erase an external hard drive? Please continue reading.

Step 1. Make sure the external hard drive is connected to your computer.

Step 2. Launch MiniTool System Booster and enter its main interface. In the Performance section, select Toolbox options from the drop-down menu. After that, click the Drive Cleaner option to continue.

Step 3. Select the drive you want to erase and select the erase method. After that, click the Erase Selected Drive button.

Summarize

All in all, this article describes a variety of ways to help you erase external hard drives.

If you have any problems using MiniTool software, please feel free to contact us.

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