How to Wipe Clean your Hard Drive HDD or SSD

Hello, this is Gio. Hey, today I'm going to show you how to wipe and clean either a traditional hard disk drive or a solid state drive, either if you just want to get rid of it, throw it away, you want to resell it, or you may just want to reuse it and just have a clean disk drive. Today I'll show you how to do that. Okay, so the first thing you probably want to do is identify which drive you actually want to wipe and clean. Now it's not as simple as knowing, oh, I want to clean the C drive or the D drive or the F drive. Each one of those designations has to do with a disk number that's on your machine. And so to do that, you want to go to the lower left of your machine and right click at the start right here and go to disk management. And so that will open up a little window, as you can see here, and you can see a variety of drives. Right here is disk 0, and that's my C drive. Disk 1 is an F drive. Disk 2 is an unallocated drive. But I'm interested in wiping and cleaning this disk 4. It doesn't have a drive designation, but I do know there's things on it, but I want to clean that off. Now yours might actually have a drive designation. This one does not, but I want to remember it is disk 4. So we'll go ahead and close the disk management. And next we want to go into your command prompt. So you want to go to your search bar and type in command prompt. And it's already up there. It's right here. So we'll go ahead and go into that and you'll get your traditional command prompt as you see here. Okay, so from here you want to go and type in diskpart. That's one word. So d-i-s-k-p-a-r-t. Hit enter. And in this case it opens up a different window. And you are in diskpart. Next you want to list your disks. So you just hit list disk. And that will come with the list of basically the disks we already looked at. So disk 1, I already said that was my C drive disk. Or excuse me, disk 0 was my C drive. Disk 1 was my F drive etc. And the one I was interested in cleaning was disk 4. So that's the one that I want to clean. Okay, since I want to clean disk 4, I hit type in select disk 4 and then hit enter. And then it says disk 4 is now the selective disk. And so to clean this and totally wipe everything off the disk, all you have to do from here is hit clean all. So clean space all and then hit enter. And then from here the disk will be cleaned completely. So this might take a little bit of time, but eventually you will get a message saying diskpart succeeded in cleaning this disk. And there you go. The hard drive has been successfully cleaned. Now in my case this is a 4 terabyte hard drive, so it's pretty large. And this did take several hours to complete, but I did finally get this completion message. And from here you can simply type the word exit to leave diskpart and then just simply close the command prompt window. And now you can safely dispose of or sell the hard drive. Now if you do want to reuse this hard drive, you will first have to reinitialize it and create a volume on the hard drive. And so that will be my next video. So if you're interested in reinitializing this and reusing the hard drive, go ahead and wait for my next video. Well I hope this video helped you out, and if it did please hit that like button at the bottom of the screen. And even consider subscribing to my channel. I have many more videos to come.