- Erase Free Space Windows
- Erase Free Space Mac Ssd Drive
- Erase Free Space On Hard Drive
- How To Wipe Free Space
- Free Space On A Mac
Jul 12, 2018 With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not available in Disk Utility. These options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data. 7 Free Tools To Change Photo’s Exif Data, Remove Metadata And Hide Dates. 7 Free Tools To Test SSD Speed And Hard Drive Performance. 6 Free USB Flash Drives / Portable HDD Password And Encryption Tools. 5 Free CD DVD Data Recovery Software – Repair Scratched or Damaged Disc. If you find this is the case with your system, and Disk Utility only shows the Erase Free Space option as being grayed out, then it is likely the reason is because your Mac is using an SSD as its.
If you’re selling an old Mac with a hard drive, a spare hard drive, or you’re just quite paranoid about your deleted data, you’re either familiar with—or should be familiar with—the Erase Free Space button on the Erase tab in Disk Utility (found in your Applications -> Utilities folder).
Editor’s note: This Terminal tip originally ran in March 2009 and is only useful for mechanical hard drives and not the SSDs found in newer Macs.
When you click this button, you’re presented with three options for securely erasing the free space on your hard drive: write over the free space with zeros (fast and relatively safe), write over the free space three times (more secure, very slow), or write over the free space seven times (extremely slow).
This feature cane used whenever selling an old machine with a hard drive. Format the drive and install a fresh copy of macOS, then use Disk Utility to erase the free space (typically the one-time write-with-zeros option). This gives me a good sense of security, as it would take a team of dedicated professionals, and possibly special hardware, to have some chance of recovering any of my deleted data.
Use Terminal to securely erase a drive
What if you want to do this from Terminal instead? In Terminal, a program named diskutil provides most of the features of macOS’s Disk Utility.
(Please note that, as with many Terminal commands, there’s a chance of Really Bad Things happening if you make a mistake with the following instructions. Proceed with caution, and make sure your backups are current before you try any of the following.)
To find out about diskutil in detail, type man diskutil at the Terminal prompt. Within the man pages, you’ll find the explanation for how to securely erase a disk’s free space using diskutil:
But how do you figure out what to list for device, which is the disk (or partition) that has the free space you’re trying to securely erase? diskutil can provide that information, too. Just use diskutil list to see a list of all drives and partitions. On the far right, you’ll see an IDENTIFIER column; that column contains the identifier that diskutil needs. Here’s an example of the list output on my machine:
IDG
There’s just one last bit of information you need to know to erase the free space on a hard drive from the command line. In Unix, all devices appear as part of the file system tree, and in macOS, they’re all listed in the /dev directory. So if I want to use diskutil to erase the free space on my Apple_HFS Untitled volume on my external drive, using the single-pass method, the final command would look like this:
diskutil secureErase freespace 1 /dev/disk2s1
Warning! It’s critically important that you include the freespace portion of that command. If you don’t, diskutil will happily start securely erasing the entire disk, instead of just the free space! Yes, that’s a Really Bad Thing, especially because it will be securely erased, meaning there’s no chance you’ll be able to recover the data.
Erase Free Space Windows
Summary: Before you sell or donate your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, you’d better permanently erase data from it. AweEraser is a safe data erasure program. It can help you securely and permanently erase data from SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD without affecting the performance of it.
SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is one of the most popular external SSD brands. If you own a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and you are going to sell, donate it or give it away, you’d better permanently erase all sensitive data to avoid any potential security issue. How to permanently erase data from your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD? Just delete the sensitive data or format the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD? No, the deleted or formatted still can be recovered by data recovery software (check this guide: recover formatted or deleted data from SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD).
If you want to permanently erase data from your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, you need to download special data erasure software, such as AweEraser. This data erasure program supports to securely and permanently erase data from any type of storage device or hard drive. It offers certified data erasure standards such as HMG Infosec Standard 5 (1 pass), Peter Gutmann's algorithm 2 (2 passes), U.S. Army AR380-19 (3 passes), DoD 5220.22-M ECE (7 passes), Peter Gutmann's algorithm 35 (35 passes).
- Once your data on SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is erased by AweEraser, the data will be lost forever, can’t be recovered by any data recovery software.
- AweEraser is 100% safe data erasure software, it will not cause any damage and will not shorten the service life of your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
- This data erasure software also can help you repair crashed SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
Three modes to permanently erase data from your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD
Follow the steps to permanently erase data from SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD:
Step 1. Download and install AweEraser on your PC or Mac. Then connect the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD to your computer.
Step 2. Run AweEraser on your computer. Then choose a data erasure mode to help you permanently erase data from the connected SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
Erase Files - selectively erase files and folders from your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
Erase Hard Drive - permanently erase all data from your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
Erase Free Space - wipe free disk space of the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD to permanently erase already deleted/lost data.
Erase Free Space Mac Ssd Drive
Step 3. Click on Erase button to permanently erase the target data. Once the process gets finished, the data will be lost forever, can’t be recovered by any data recovery software.
Please note that once the data is erased by AweEraser, the data is lost forever, can’t be recovered by any data recovery method. So, please make a backup of your SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD data before you permanently erase it.
This software also can help you fix logical errors on crashed SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD. Just wipe the crashed SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, then all logical errors will be fixed.
Erase Free Space On Hard Drive
Some useful solutions:
How To Wipe Free Space
AweEraser can help you securely and permanently erase data from SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD. It will help you permanently erase data from Seagate external hard drive, memory card, digital camera, USB flash drive, PC, Mac, etc. Download it here: