Windows 7: Cipher or Format console program to wipe (write 0) across a hard drive

Question

How good of a job does Windows 7 cipher do in wiping a hard drives contents?

I have cmd elevated with administrator privileges and I'm running cipher with /w on a designated 1TB Seagate hard drive. Currently I formatted the hard drive to NTFS with a single partition and volume.

I've seen a hand full of applications that you can buy that will securely wipe the data of a drive so that software data recovery programs can not retrieve any of the old existing data. Instead of spending $30 - 100 for some 3rd party program I was wondering if cipher will do the job that I'm after. I'm planning on using this drive to install Windows 10.

If this is a time consuming process, what would be a good free application to wipe a hard drive?

Or would windows format option be better? For Example:

c:\format f: /fs:NTFS /p:1 

Answer 1

Since time consumption is an issue; I went ahead and downloaded DBAN to do the job for me. I found Rufus to install it to a USB flash drive. I'm using DBAN's quick format write all 0s single pass on my 1TB drive and its estimated time to run is approximately 3 hours. I can live with this knowing that the drive was wiped with all 0s. If time wasn't an issue I would of used one of DBAN's DOD methods. But even a single round of DOD with 7 passes and a single verify on the last pass would take about 14-15 hours.