How is the data erased?

Active@ KillDisk accesses storage devices directly at the sector level, bypassing the operating system's file system layer entirely. Depending on the platform, it communicates with drives through low-level OS interfaces — for example, direct disk I/O APIs on Windows, raw device access on Linux, or IOKit on macOS — allowing it to erase HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives regardless of the file system or partition scheme used (MBR or GPT), and independently of whether the drive contains FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, APFS, or any other file system.

To erase data, Active@ KillDisk overwrites every addressable sector on the drive. The FREE version supports a single-pass overwrite with zeros. The Professional version offers more than 20 data erasure standards for multi-pass overwriting.

For example, the US DoD 5220.22-M method overwrites all addressable storage and indexing locations on the drive three times — with zeros (0x00), the complement (0xFF), and random characters — and then verifies the writing procedure. For SSD and NVMe drives, KillDisk can additionally use device-specific commands such as ATA Secure Erase, which instructs the drive's own firmware to reset all storage cells.