I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?

They are running windows vista and 10 I think.

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
    10·
    11 months ago

    Geez at the answers in the thread. Boot off a USB drive with Linux, right click the HD, and simply format the drive. Not a quick format, you may have to unselect that. You’ll know because a quick format will take seconds, a full format will take an hour (depending on the size of course).

    Then donate the laptops. Donation place should be able to install Linux. Most people don’t need much laptop.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
      4·
      11 months ago

      Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?

      Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        11 months ago

        Even writing 0’s takes hours per TB sometimes. Guess it depends on how much time you have

        • Knusper@feddit.de
          3·
          11 months ago

          It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.

          That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.