Test a New External Hard Drive by Doing a Secure Erase

External hard drives are great for all sorts of things, but sometimes you get a bum drive.

Doing a secure erase of the drive gives it a stress test before you put it into service.

This writes data to the entire drive and verifies that it can read and write data on every sector.

If it survives the secure erase, then it’s good for holding data.

Check outthis guidefor details on doing a secure erase.

The Care and Feeding of External Hard Drives| TidBITS

Photo byKaren.