How to wipe a Hard Drive?

[GregoryHayes]

I'm wanting to sell my PC, but how do I wipe it to the point that there is no recoverable sensitive data on it anymore? Also, does anyone know where I should be pricing it at?

I have a gtx 1080, i7 4790k, 1000w PSU by Corsair, h60 liquid cooling(closed) on the cpu, 16 GB of RAM(I think the speed is around 1800-2300 MHz, ddr3) the motherboard chipset is LGA 1150 so it's kind of dated but it does have an m.2 slot for a mini SSD. Also it has 3 chassis fans that keep it fairly cool. Also it runs off of Windows 10. (I'm not trying to sell it here, that would be against the rules, I'm just asking opinions on the price point)

[Mark.]

as to drive wiping, what's wrong with the good old format command.
untick the Quick Format option, let it do a low-level format and it'll wipe 0's or 1's to the entire drive.if you are really *censored*, repeat that process a couple of times.

personally, I see no point in multiple passes, if someone has the right software, inclination, time and resources, they'll get data off the surface.
yes, it won't be that porn stash or all your tax records but it could easily be a few strings of your bank number or a handful of characters from your job application.
and with that sort of data - whoa watch out - real-name fraud here we come (ok, sarcasm off now)

as to the price, while no expert, $1000'ish seems too high.  you have to price it so that even thinking about comparing it to a new unit isn't even considered a viable alternative.
and as a good will measure, maybe throw in 3 months warranty.

[Ajfer03]

A good program to use is http://www.diskwipe.org/    You will have to hook the hard drive up to a separate computer if you want to use this command. I think the US DOD 7 pass format should be good to keep most of your data safe. It will take a while to complete. Just make sure to leave your computer on, and disable hibernation and Stand-By mode.

[Lisa_maree]

To get the best price for a used computer it is best to sell it setup with Windows. To do this you can refresh windows 10, deleting all your data. without loosing the windows setup. If you have other  mechanical drives  in the computer then maybe take these out and keep them the time to erase a mechanical drive so it can't be recovered, is often more time than drive is worth to sell.
I was thinking you may have a 250gb SSD with windows and a 2 TB with just data. The 2 Tb isn't going to add much to the sale price so just keep it. If your windows drive is an ssd the above procedure of deleting your data will be fine.

Here is a link to a how to refresh windows.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4130-reset-windows-10-a.html
     

[jimmy1]

Best method is buy someone elses hard drive or a low cost hard drive and install that into your computer and install the OS to that and then sell it and retain your hard drive as the best method to someone not ever getting your data.

Newegg for example sells refurbished hard drives for as low as around $9.99 at times. I have bought these drives for projects where I have a system with removable drive bay so 1 computer can act as many depending on what drive is in the bay, as well as to retain my drives and my data under my control when selling or giving away my computers to others when I am done with them.

Look at ebay and parts out what you have and see what bids are happening for hardware as a best measure of what the actual used value is. Add the values together to get a ball park  figure of what people are willing to spend and then you will know what its worth. That is the method I take. I have had some stuff before that I was going to sell and then looked at ebay and amazon to see what the components were going for before and been like wow... the bottom fell out I will just keep it, or maybe its not that bad and there is a good demand still and sell it to get a better part of what I originally spent for the hardware back. Video cards I have found have had an interesting used value as some are buying top of the line high end cards to farm bitcoin or other cyber currency and when a better video card comes out and the ROI quick  isn't there anymore, they sell off these video cards that aren't that old but in some cases saturate the used video card market causing prices to be cheaper than you expect due to supply and demand and when there is too many of them and they are each undercutting the other guy to try to unload them to recoup most of their money to pay for the newer cards, it can cause an interesting market for used video cards. All other hardware has a more constant decline in value. The market will tell you what you have and what you can get by looking at what others are selling stuff for in which bids from multiple sources can use used as a indicator as to what people are biting at for prices.

[DaveLembke]

+1 to Neweggs low cost refurb drives.  I have been buying these for a while for projects and no DOA's yet. Most of them are drives that are used ( with up to around 23,000 hours of wear being the most used drive sold to me ) and come wiped with a warranty. However I also bought these drives before and lucked out to get some that had less than 10 hours of run time on them and they were brand new. So those were either new drives that someone found in storage somewhere that are an obsolete model or these drives had a problem that was corrected and when tested good they were sold off.

Only thing I would say as a negative thing to using these drives is, if you value your data, buy a brand new drive and not a refurb. But if the drive dies you have no problem with a total loss of what is on the drive then you can cut corners and save money if storage capacity of 160GB or 250GB is plenty.

But one way to go cheap and have reliability in data storage would be to buy 2 drives and run them in RAID 1 Mirror, so if one drive dies your data is still on the other healthy drive. If your data is critical a RAID Mirror or better form of RAID should be in place if not a backup plan at minimum to store data to another destination should your drive fail.