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How good is the erasure of the hard drive with disc utility in Catalina?

Trading in my iMac 2014 for a new one. Was erasing the disc in recovery mode with disc utility. In the past, it asked how securely the wipe should be, but didn’t find that option with disc utility in Catilina. It went fast ( secure erasure in the past could take hours). Is it good, the way it is done now...or should I be looking for another solution before I send in the old iMac 🤔

Posted on Sep 7, 2020 1:03 PM

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Posted on Sep 7, 2020 11:32 PM

Chatted with Apple online . They said that the multi pass Erasure was not offered through disc utility as an option any longer and the present wipe was secure. Nevertheless, I did run it several times, just to be sure😂

13 replies

Sep 7, 2020 3:56 PM in response to dialabrain

Ok...got it back out, once again started up in recovery mode. Opened disc utilities. Show all devices. Has a fusion drive that can’t be erased, the Macintosh HD data and HD along with container...which can be erased, but in none of them does a box for security options appear🙁 Sorry to be such a pain, but a security option is not appearing on my machine running Catalina in recovery mode.

Sep 8, 2020 7:24 PM in response to Joe Mooney

The best thing to do when wanting to securely erase a Mac which uses a hard drive is to first enable Filevault and let Filevault finish encrypting the drive. Once the drive is encrypted, then a simple erase is enough to destroy the Filevault encryption keys preventing access to any data on the drive.


It is possible to write zeroes to the hard drive using the Terminal command line utility "dd".


If you only have an SSD and TRIM is enabled (the default for an Apple SSD), then just erasing the SSD using Disk Utility is enough to have the SSD zeroed out immediately because all the blocks on the SSD have been marked deleted and TRIM resets those unused blocks to zeroes.


There is a way to utilize the built-in hardware secure erase feature of hard drives and many SSDs, but this requires a Linux boot disk and Linux utility to access this hardware feature of the drives. If you perform the other steps I mentioned here your data will be unrecoverable.

Sep 8, 2020 7:44 PM in response to HWTech

Thank you so much.😃 Although I have already done my best to clear it....and have sent it back to Apple; I think this is very helpful for the future! I have been used to the earlier disc utility offering a secure option whilst in recovery mode, or used a targeted erasure in earlier Mac’s with another computer, but those had been options that were clearly available and documented/supported for clearing the drive. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, and seems to be poorly documented. I would have thought that instructions would have been forwarded by Apple with the other trade in materials. I guess with drives going to SSD’s rather disc drives, the point will be moot, but these are great techniques for others looking for secure wiping of drives before return or sale!! Thanks again!!😃

Sep 8, 2020 8:01 PM in response to Joe Mooney

Some of Apple's documentation is quite poor and misleading. Plus most of Apple's documentation only pertains to the newer hardware and doesn't consider older hardware. And Apple makes a lot of assumptions which are not always correct. I'm sorry I didn't see your post earlier, but I've been quite busy the last few days.


Hopefully the information in this thread will be able to help someone else who is trying to do the same thing.

How good is the erasure of the hard drive with disc utility in Catalina?

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