The drives toward the top should be under the “Internal” header, while your external drives will be under the “External” header.
Once opened, should see the drive connected to your Mac in the left sidebar of the window. Then open the Disk Utility app by opening the Applications folder, then the Utilities folder, and finding Disk Utility in there. Go ahead and plug your external drive into your Mac. But certain personal photos, financial documents, or other files with sensitive info are things you probably don’t want to be recovered. You probably wouldn’t care if someone recovered an old school essay from your drive. In a lot of cases, this quick erase is fine. Fortunately most good flash drives and other solid state storage mediums wear out after millions of uses, but each little bit helps. that part of the drive where the file is store will wear out a little bit and eventually won’t be usable. Every time you save a file, add something, etc. Unlike the older spinning drives, a solid state drive can only be written to so many times. Unless you want to be waiting hours, maybe even days for a drive to erase, you’re going to want to use quick erase.Īnother reason is with the rise of solid state drives, which includes things like flash drives, erasing caused wear on the drives. Again, this analogy isn’t perfect, but it makes the point.
Someone with special tools or who knew how to chip paint at a wall may be able to recover parts of it. If you paint over it you won’t see what’s underneath, but the original paint is still there. It’s kind of like painting over a wall with some art or graffiti on it. When you wipe a drive this way, your Mac (or other computer) simply tells the drive to just ignore whatever is on there and let it be written over. This is also true on other systems like Windows and Linux. In the name of speed, the quick erase function was developed. However, as we began to work with drives that were starting to use Gigabytes of storage, it began to take longer and longer to erase these drive. Back when drives were much smaller, they did in fact do this. You may be asking yourself why don’t the files get erased when I tell it to wipe the drive, and this is understandable. If you want to make sure that the external drive, you’ll want to wipe it in a secure fashion. However, did you know that you’re not actually erasing anything? While you may not be able to see any files, that drive can still have those files on it, and someone with the know-how and a few apps may be able to recover the files. If you’re looking to get rid of or reuse an external drive, you can go to Disk Utility to format it.