The lowly Format command provides some simple, yet fairly effective data destruction for hard disks that you have on your machine. Although this technique may not be suitably effective for all data destruction requirements, it is fairly thorough in the destruction of data on a disk; such as one you wish to reuse for another purpose or then proceed to physically destroy ahead of disposal. Bear in mind that this may not be suitable for SSD disks which may still have residual data on blocks that have been marked as failing and thus removed from use but still contain some data remnants, a format will not touch these, ergo some data may be left behind.
!!! Data loss can and will occur, so ensure you are formatting the correct disk and have backup of critical data before performing these steps.
To do this open a Command Prompt in “Administrator Mode”, then run the command as shown below. In this example we are formatting the “d:” drive.
format d: /fs:NTFS /p:3Simple as that. In this case the /p:3 sets the format to zero every sector of the volume; after it has done that, it then proceeds to repeat the process by the number of times specified with a different random number each time.