"See Sanitizing hard drives at the hardware level. The tool it links to is DOS-based and may or may not work on an Intel Mac, but you might be able to find a similar tool which is designed for Mac. If not, you can always plug the drive into a PC.
Its advantage over programs like DBAN is that it uses an ATA command built into all modern hard drives which gets the job done quicker and more securely than any software can.
After wiping the drive, recycle it if you can rather than discarding. In Australia there's Byteback for (free) recycling of computer parts." "See Sanitizing hard drives at the hardware level. The tool it links to is DOS-based and may or may not work on an Intel Mac, but you might be able to find a similar tool which is designed for Mac. If not, you can always plug the drive into a PC.
Its advantage over programs like DBAN is that it uses an ATA command built into all modern hard drives which gets the job done quicker and more securely than any software can.
After wiping the drive, recycle it if you can rather than discarding. In Australia there's Byteback for (free) recycling of computer parts."
"Just perform a full format (no quick formats here!) on it. Unless you're a government official who stores nuclear launch codes, it'll be enough to stop recovery.
The way file recovery programs work is scanning the disk for data that looks like a file - it can't find it because it's place in the file table is missing. A quick format just wipes the file table, whereas a full format fills the hard drive with zeros. A ""secure"" format fills the hard drive with zeros. Several times. More secure? Yes. Necessary? Not for most of us.
Of course, it feels really, really good to do it, so I recommend Boot and nuke."
