You’ll notice that this feature is available in all versions of Mac OS X except El Capitan, where it was removed from Disk Utility, presumably because many of the popular Macs come with SSDs by default.It reaches a time when you want to dispose of your old hard drive and want to acquire a new one. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning for the sake of thoroughness.

Finally, if you have definitely decided to run this process on an SSD, you can use this workaround to perform a secure removal of SSDs, although it is certainly not necessary for SSDs to work, nor is it recommended because it puts unnecessary write to the SSD, which can reduce its potential lifespan. This can also provide a delayed alternative to using the protected empty Recycle Bin feature in OS X if you later decide that you want to prevent some deleted files from being recovered.

This makes it a great solution for situations where you are cleaning up an existing OS X installation for a new owner and want to keep installed applications, but you don’t want anyone to possibly recover your deleted personal information.Īgain, this is for the most part unnecessary for most users, but it is a good practice to remove free space from all traditional hard drives to which ownership is transferred. Of course, the difference here is that this trick only focuses on safely deleting free space (i.e., focusing on files deleted through the Recycle Bin) and has no effect on other contents of your hard drives. These options are exactly the same as the overall protected design of the entire hard drive. Keep in mind that the latter two options take longer to complete because they perform the same replacement task either 3 or 7 times. The safest – the safest option that lasts the longest, this writes data to free space a total of 7 timesĬhoose the option that best suits your needs, but it’s generally recommended that you use the “secure” or “safest” option if you plan to transfer ownership of a hard drive or suspect a hard drive that once contains important data.Protected (medium option) – triple deletion, this writes zeros to the unused state three times.Fastest – The fastest option, this overwrites one set of zeros on the unused portion of the hard drive.The three options for clearing space are as follows: Select the desired wipe level and select “Delete free space” to start replacing the free space on the hard disk.Select the “Delete” tab and select the “Delete Free Space” option.Connect a hard disk if it is an external disk, and then select the hard disk from the menu on the left.Launch Disk Utility from / Applications / Utilities / or Launchpad.

Free disk eraser for mac