Hey everyone! I'm planning to return my 5TB Western Digital external hard drive to Costco, but I want to make sure all my data is wiped properly first. I enabled hardware encryption on it with a weak password before copying around 2TB of data. Should I go ahead and use DBAN to wipe it, or is simply formatting the drive and removing the password enough? Any advice would be appreciated!
2 Answers
You might be fine with just wiping the encryption key if you've encrypted the drive. But if you really want to be cautious, using DBAN is the safest bet. There are some standard practices like NIST 800-88 and DoD 5220.22-M for decommissioning drives that could be worth checking out!
A good alternative is to run the Diskpart Clean All command. That should adequately wipe the data for most purposes.
Yeah, I've heard DBAN is the way to go if you want to completely obliterate everything. Better safe than sorry!