Will formatting a drive completely erase it?

I know roughly that when sending a file to the Recycle bin and then emptying the trash won't delete the information on a drive. It will infact mark that area on the drive where that file was as usable again and can be written over, but can still maintain its charge electrical state on the drive in of course its basic form of binary electrically charged state, thus making it recoverable to specialists that can perform data recovery. But, will, FORMATTING a drive reset a drive altogether and reset the electrical charge on the drive making it impossible for data to be recovered?

 

I recently watched Vsauce's 'Where do deleted files go?' in which he spoke of this topic but I this wasn't something he discussed. He mentioned that, if you wanted to erase all of the information on a drive you'd have to re-write over that information across the entire drive to effectively 'reset' the drives information, but, once you erase all that information, Isn't that then sat on the drive but also stored as a form of binary electrically charged state, but marked as free space?

 

here's the video i'm refferencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5s4-Kak49o

If you really want "wipe" a drive,doing what the video said is correct (I believe) delete everything then fill it again with a bunch of random files (this will write over the files), repeat until satisfied. To my understanding formatting is another form of deleting, that will just mark it as "free space", because no matter what the drive was written to and I'm pretty sure when you format a drive whatever was on there is gone.

short answer: writing multiple times over any file will screw it up real nice

If you do a full format, where the disk is overwritten with 0s then that will delete everything on the disk. A quick format just resets the partition table and tells the system that the disk is empty.

There is software for writing random bits to disks multiple times for the purpose of securely erasing files, but unless you have some really sensitive files where someone will pay a lot of money to recover it a regular full format will be enough to make it unrecoverable to the average person.

But it is fairly trivial to recover information from a disk if a file is deleted but not overwritten as the data still exists.