Wipe Free Space on Hard Drive in Windows 10/11 – Effective Approach

Summary- This article gives a comprehensive overview of how to wipe free space on hard drive in Windows 10/11 securely. It highlights the benefits of doing so and explains the methods, ensuring your data remains private and secure.

Clearing free space on a hard drive means securely erasing data of the files that have already been deleted as just deleting files from your hard drive may not be enough. The data can be recovered abruptly, making it crucial to wipe free space on your hard drive. This is crucial because all the erased files are completely wiped and unrecoverable.

For example, if you’re selling your computer, the new owner shouldn’t be able to recover your personal photos, financial records, or any sensitive documents that you have already deleted. Similarly, businesses need to ensure that no confidential information can be recovered using utilities and hardware.

In further sections, we will take a look at various methods to free up space on hard drive Windows, but first, let us take a look at the reasons to clear empty space on a hard drive.

Why Free up Space on Hard Drive in Windows?

Clearing empty space in your hard drive is an important step to protect your data and maintain the security of your system. Thus, down below are several key reasons why you should wipe free space on your hard drive-

• Enhanced Data Security- When you delete a file, the data is not fully removed, instead, the space it occupies is marked as available for new data. Wiping free space ensures that the “deleted data” cannot be recovered by overwriting it with random data.
• Protection of Sensitive Information- Wiping free space protects sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized individuals. It can be personal photos, financial records, or business documents.
• Compliance with Data Protection Regulations- For businesses, erasing unused space on devices helps meet data protection rules and ensures that no leftover data can be recovered from any equipment.

How to Wipe Free Space on Hard Drive in Windows 10/11?

Freeing up the space on your hard drive is essential to enhance your system performance. By that time, the unnecessary files, system logs, and temporary data tend to take up valuable space on your hard drive. There are several built-in tools and utilities one can utilize to clean empty space in a Hard drive. Now, we will explore the methods in detail and follow the step-by-step guidelines to perform the task securely.

Method 1- Using Cipher Tool to Clear Space on Hard Drive in Windows

Cipher is a built-in Windows tool that is used to overwrite deleted data securely. You can use this tool to wipe free space on hard drive in Windows 10/11. Follow the steps to proceed-

Step 1. Open Command(Admin) by pressing Windows Key + X and selecting “Command Prompt” from the menu.

Step 2. Type the following command and press Enter–

             cipher /w:C:\

Step 3. Replace “C” with the drive letter of the partition you want to wipe. This command will overwrite all the free space on the drive with zeroes, 0xFF, and random data in three passes.

Method 2- Wipe Free Space on Hard Drive in Windows Using Diskpart Utility

Diskpart is a powerful command-line utility in Windows that can be used to free up space on a hard drive. It is much more suitable for wiping entire volumes. Follow the steps given below-

Step 1. Press Windows Key + X and select “Command Prompt (Admin)” or “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” from the menu.

Step 2. Type the following command to clean a specific partition

diskpart

Step 3. Doing this will launch the diskpart Utility. Now, type the following command.

List disk 

Step 4. This will list all the available disks on your system with numbers. To select a disk you want to wipe, type-

Select disk X

Where X is the disk number of your Drive.

Step 5. Now, to wipe the disk, type, and press enter.

clean

Note- This method will erase all the data on the drive including free space.

Method 3- Erase Free Up Space on Hard Drive Using the Built-in Disk Clean-Up Tool 

Disk Clean-up tool is used for removing unnecessary files from the desktop but can be applied to wipe free space on a hard drive in Windows. Follow the steps given below to proceed-

Step 1. Press Windows Key + S and type Disk Cleanup. Then, select the application from the results.

Step 2. Choose the drive you want to clean and click on OK.

Step 3. Click on Clean up System Files and cross-check all the files you want to delete, this helps in freeing up space before wiping the free space using this method.

Using these methods, you can wipe free space on a hard drive in Windows 10/11. However, there are certain drawbacks to these methods as they may be time-consuming for larger drives, and may degrade system performance during the process. Some of the limitations are given below.

Limitations of the Manual Methods

Although the methods mentioned above can effectively wipe free space on your hard drive, they do come with certain drawbacks-

• Time-Consuming- These methods can be slow when erasing space from large drives with significant free space and can take a lot of time.
• Resource-Intensive- These methods can consume significant system resources, and can also affect performance.
• Destructive for Some Methods– Certain commands can remove all data on the selected volume only, not just free space.
• Manual Operation- Manual intervention and commands can be complex and error-prone.
• Limited Scope- Some tools are primarily designed for removing unnecessary files and temporary data, they do not wipe free space securely.

Conclusion

The above article gives you a detailed explanation of how to wipe free space on hard drive in Windows 10/11 and its several importance. We thoroughly discussed various methods to free up space in your hard drive. As you know now, deleting data from your computer does not provide much security as data can be restored. To counter this, you should delete your data permanently using the mentioned methods. However, we recommend you use our powerful wiping software as it overwrites and alters the 0s and 1s multiple times. With each alteration, it becomes next to impossible to recover the original data.