Selling HDD, best way to erase?

[RedRallyeZ]

i am listing the 1tb samsung drive in my MBP on ebay as i am upgrading to a faster unit, and i have enough external storage to manage.

My question is how exactly would the best way to erase it be? there is nothing like financial data, just itunes library and school work, i was thinking a simple re-partition, but i know disk utility has the different security level options, which seem to take hours on end. if those are overkill, ill just skip them, but would like to hear your thoughts.

thanks,

 

[alust2013]

Probably just a one-pass with zeroes. Shouldn't take a horribly long time, and if there's nothing particularly sensitive, that should be more than enough.

 

[cloroxbleach4]

Probably just a one-pass with zeroes. Shouldn't take a horribly long time, and if there's nothing particularly sensitive, that should be more than enough.

+1. Same thing I did when I sold my HDD

 

[dagamer34]

No important data - one pass of zeros.
Semi-important data - 2-3 manual passes of zeros.
Financial/Work data - 7 passes of zeros.
Data you can't let anyone else have - destroy the hard drive and learn to keep your data on encrypted flash drives with hidden partitions using TrueCrypt.
Government data - hand over to IT department for sanitization.

For the not so paranoid - I'd just stick to one pass. The likelihood of someone actually bothering enough to read the magnetic data of the drive to get to previously written data is so low that if you're worrying about that, you have bigger problems, like having people with that much time/money caring for what your data is!

 

[RedRallyeZ]

For the not so paranoid - I'd just stick to one pass. The likelihood of someone actually bothering enough to read the magnetic data of the drive to get to previously written data is so low that if you're worrying about that, you have bigger problems, like having people with that much time/money caring for what your data is!

cool,

i've always bought into the "security based on no one cares" mentality, so ill just run a one-pass over it. If someone takes the time to dig things off of this, they'll find car pictures and english homework. i appreciate it, ill definitely not lose sleep over it.