Cannibalizing Hard drive

Hi there forum I need some help.

I'm cannibalizing an old (2 yr old) hard drive from a laptop that had windows installed on it. I am going to use it in a futur build however I want to use it right now as an external hard drive. I've got the enclosure it's just how do you clean the disk ie delete everthing on it? Is it recommeded by deleting it like a normal file on a usb stick or does it need a special program to wipe it?

Thanks

you can do it either way. But I would zero the drive out for extra security

Could you suggest a program to zero the drive?

Wait what?  Why woud you want to zero the drive if you're not selling it?  Zeroing the drive takes a long time, depending on drive speed/capacity.

Its got a lot of useless junk and also it could help performance by 'marking' the bad bits of the hard drive. The kind of content I'll be using it for will be differrent as it will be for lossless music and movies instead of an OS.

He stated he wanted it to use for an external drive. I'm just taking the extra security precautions incase the external hard drive got stolen

Sounds like a good plan!