Apple Intelligence is now available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac!
📢 Newsroom Update
Apple introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max. Learn more >
Apple introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max. Learn more >
I have a late 2010 Mac Pro with 1 - 1T SSD drive and 2 - HDs. The SSD is the startup drive. I want to wipe securely the 2 - HDs and take the SSD out before giving to charity. I tried to use the Disk Utility within the SSD and wipe the 2 - HDs but all the data still seems to be there!?? What's the most effective (time with security) way to wipe the 2 - HDs and install the OS on at least 1 - HD? Thank you!
Hi,
Boot in Recovery mode then formatting with DiskUtility > security options set it most secure may be most secures.
As for install macOS, Reinstall macOS can install proper macOS on your HDD.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314
What to do before sell, give away or trade Mac.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
You can also create a bootable Parted Magic USB drive using Etcher. Option Boot the Parted Magic drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". Once at the Parted Magic desktop, there should be an icon for erasing drives. If you choose the "ATA Secure Erase" option within the app, then you should be able to erase all three drives simultaneously if you want using the drive's own built in secure erase function which will be slightly faster than writing zeroes to the drive using software such as Disk Utility. By using the ATA Secure Erase feature, you also minimize the wear on the SSD and it will erase the blocks not accessible to the OS. Plus a secure erase on an SSD resets the SSD to factory defaults and performance. For the hard drives the hardware ATA Secure Erase will end up writing zeroes to the drive for you.
The last free version of Parted Magic is available from the MajorGeek's website using this link. [This is a Direct Download Link]
[Edited by Moderator]
If you simply take the default for Erase, the directory area on the drive is overwritten, but for a Rotating drive, the data area is not overwritten. It completes in about a minute, because it does not write over the data blocks.
One click off the default assures that the data area will be overwritten once, which takes all afternoon. That suffices for all but nuclear secrets. You can choose more overwriting, but each pass is done sequentially, so the time spent will go up dramatically, and the increased security for practical purposes in only slightly better than the initial pass.
Much older Disk Utility running under MacOS could open multiple windows and do multiple things at once. The re-write that includes Volume View and Device View is single-threaded. It cannot erase two drives at the same time. Every version that runs in Installer/Utilities is single-threaded.
Okay, I did the secure wipe where it does one pass with random data followed by a pass with all zeros -- seems to be a good compromise for effectiveness. Now, how do I get the latest OS system on one of these drives?
Pardon my naivety, but where do you find the Image of the OS to create a bootable OS drive? Is there any reason why I couldn't use the Image (wherever that is) and copy directly to the 'clean' HD? I've downloaded Etcher so am ready to copy the Image.
Download the Parted Magic .iso file and use that file as the source in Etcher.
Wiping 2 internal drives in a Mac Pro
