
The only program I know that will do a decent job (warning i have only tested recovery myself once with this but you can research more if you wish) of deleting and overwriting without reformatting is secure delete or sdelete. I already know you do not wish to reformat your hdd, so since that is my advice I will try to offer an alternative. If that is the case, I would suggest moving all needed files to external storage and then using dban or similar to overwrite the disk a few times, I think default settings are DoD compliant, but you could overwrite more times if you wish. If you need to make it non-recoverable, many of the solutions listed above are not sufficient. More importantly, you should focus on what your idea of permanently deleting something means.

Pick a way, do it right before you go to bed, wake up and it will be done. I am against using speed as a deciding factor though as all of them will take time when deleting that amount of stuff.

Is speed really a concern? I would say robocopy might be the fastest way.
