Secure Erase @ home

The best option to erase the content from a disk is to destroy this hard drive physically. Melt it in fire or drill it in several places. The side effect is, nobody is going to buy the drive after that.

In software, there are several programs both free and paid which are capable of overwriting the information by either zeros or some random noise. Once overwritten, the data is irreversibly deleted.

To get the same result yourself without special software, format the drive and then load it fully with any data you don’t care about (for example multiple copies of House MD videos). Once the big file fits no longer, continue adding smaller files. USB enclosure is fine for that  purpose, no connection to motherboard is required.

Alternatively, use Windows Vista or Windows 7 to do a complete format of the drive. It will overwrite whatever data there may be with zeros. This does not work if you use Windows XP.

If you have one of those modern Self Encrypting Disks, just changing a password gets you pretty much the same result as secure erase.