Going to sell my 500g Passport to upgrade, how many times to Format?

Fumz said:

If piece of mind is what you're after, why not just destroy the drive and get rid of it? I didn't even realize there was a market for used hard drives...

I think a used 500g Passport that is in great condition still has a market out there... I could probably get $60 for it, which is half of what a new 1TB Passport is going to cost me.

I just want to wipe the drive the best I can.

pffttt I didnt realize they go for $50 new.

I'm just going to run Eraser & give it to a friend & just buy the 1TB on it's own I guess.

Hi there
You don't really need any specialized programs

What I would do is

1) Format it as per windows.

2) Download a Linux Live CD

3) Get the linux system to format the HDD as ext3 and then write X'00' (Binary zeros) on EVERY sector -- not just the file areas.

(DEBIAN type distros -- Ubuntu is one of these have a WIPE command which will do just this. Knoppix is another Debian based distro -- also good).

You don't need to spend money on it.

Incidentally why SELL the 500GB disk -- there isn't much of a market for these -- a NEW one is only around 35 - 40 USD so who on earth would trust in committing their data to a USED USB HDD.

You can even get powered USB small 2 TB disks for around 90 USD (thats 2 * 1000 GB on ONE drive).

In any case you will soon find that you can NEVER have too much storage space -- I'm now on my 3rd 2 TB Disk !!!!!. I still have a few 500 and 1TB portable small USB drives too that I use for backups / archives.


I'd keep the 500 GB disk and use it for archiving / backking up some of your data such as music etc and of course image the OS.

Cheers
jimbo