This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.

We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. But you will have to wait for a long time (depending on the size of the drive) for it to be available for reuse.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. Move the slider to the bottom of the slider to Most Secure, which will overwrite the drive seven times. The next step gives you the option to rewrite the drive three times.

For added security, keep moving the slider to the right.

This option will overwrite the entire drive.

Move the slider to the second option, where it says This option writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk. This means that you or someone else can easily recover the files using data recovery software, which is not necessarily a good idea.

Fastest clears the drive data by removing the extra data, but the original files remain intact, although they will stay hidden.

This is an important step if you want to ensure that all of the current files on the drive will be deleted. This will open another window that lets you choose how you want the drive to be formatted, with a slider from Fastest to Most Secure. This name can be anything you like, but as a best practice, try to choose a specific name that describes the contents of the drive.

Microsoft bitlocker recovery tool