The security options can shorten the life of SSDs by causing excessive writes to the SSD to occur. If you wish to erase a hard drive’s volume and ensure the old information it contained can’t be easily recovered, you can use the Security Options offered when choosing the erase function.īut before you make use of the Security Options, make sure the volume being erased is part of a hard drive and not a fusion drive or an SSD.
When the erase has finished, click the Done button.Įrasing a Hard Drive Volume with Security Options The erase sheet will change to display a progress bar. In this example, we’re just performing a simple erase, so leave everything as is, except for changing the name, if needed, and then click the Erase button. The Erase sheet will drop down, presenting the options to change the volume’s name and format, and whether to use any of the Security Options. With the volume you wish to erase selected, click on the Erase button in the Disk Utility toolbar, or select Erase from the Edit menu. You should see “Physical Drive, Volume” for HFS+ formatted drives, or “Physical Drive, Container, Volume” for APFS formatted drives. The volume is the lowest item in a drive’s hierarchical view. In the sidebar, select the volume you wish to erase.
(Make sure the volume you wish to erase is selected, then use the Erase button in the toolbar to begin the erase process.) This can affect the way we might choose to erase a volume. By setting the sidebar to Show All Devices, we can readily see what a volume is associated with. In macOS High Sierra and later, volumes can be carved out of the drive using partitions, or if the drive is formatted with APFS, they can be part of a container. Select View, Show All Devices, or click the View button in the Disk Utility toolbar, and select Show All Devices from the popup menu. Launch Disk Utility, located in the /Applications/Utilities folder.
In this case, we just want to free up the space for a new use, and aren’t worried about anyone being able to recover any of our old data. Let’s start off with erasing a volume to casually remove any stored data on the selected volume. We’ll be using the Disk Utility app included with macOS High Sierra and later.
If you’re working with macOS Sierra or earlier, you may find the Rocket Yard Guide: How to Use Mac’s Disk Utility to Securely Wipe a Drive a good source of information for erasing your drives. We’ll be looking at drives formatted with APFS as well as those formatted with the traditional HFS+ file system.
In this guide, we’re going to look at erasing volumes, partitions, and containers. The second change that directly affects the Mac community, at least in the way free space can be securely erased, is the release of the APFS file system, and how it makes use of shared space between multiple volumes. (Using the Security Options to sanitize a volume may be a thing of the past.) The first change, leading to less reliance on the various secure wipe options, has been the proliferation of SSDs, both as original equipment provided by Apple and by resellers, such as OWC, which bring higher performance storage systems to the Mac. Two recent changes have made the traditional secure wipe, performed by overwriting a volume multiple times with various types of data patterns, largely a thing of the past. Even though the default for Disk Utility is a simple erase, a secure wipe was just a few clicks away. Securely wiping a drive, removing all of its data, and ensuring that no meaningful information can be recovered, has long been a feature of Disk Utility and its erase function.