I have a question for my old external drive. The drive is 5 years old and still working fine, but because I have many external drives so, i decide to sale the old ones. Before putting drive for sale, i formatted it because earlier it had my personal data. Now my question is that the data i had formatted will ever be recoverable. I want to sale it but afraid of data recovery. Please suggest what to do to make sure data will never be recoverable.
First of all, i would like to tell you that data recovery is possible even after formatting your drive. There are tools available online for recovering lost data from the formatted drives. To make sure data deletion from storage drive you can download data eraser tool. Bitraser for file software is the most fine tool i know for wiping any type of storage drives.
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Sure will … and very easily too 
Years ago i did a little test and formatted one of my hard drives and then ran a data recovery software program and was able to retrieve 99% of the data off the hard drive.
You can use 3rd party software to erase the drive or at the very least use WD’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostic and select ERASE option (which writes zeros to the hard drive)
Select FULL erase for more security (be aware though, this can take a very long time depending on the size of your hard drive.)
The last zero fill i did many years ago took me 18 hours (can’t remember the size of the hard drive … but i do remember it taking forever to finish.)
