subject: Employ A Hard Drive Eraser When It's Time To Dispose Of A Drive [print this page] When the time has come to dispose of a computer or hard drive -- for various reasons relating to issues with the drive, usually -- it might be smart to use a hard drive eraser to thoroughly clean a drive before disposing of it or even reselling it. Even after deleting files from the drive, people need to realize the information still resides on the drive, though new software today can erase it.
Generally speaking, most hard drive erasers come in software form though there are actual hardware pieces of equipment that can act as an eraser. These erasers take a hard drive and scan it over and over many times, in the process filling the surface of the drive with binary data that completely overwhelms any leftover deleted data on it. This is far better than just reformatting the drive.
Generally, any racer program does what's called a shred of the hard drive. What this means is that all partitions on the drive are filled up with binary data so much so that any deleted information on the drive will be impossible to restore with even the best forensic recovery programs. This should be of much comfort to those getting rid of their old hard drives.
Certainly, there are a wide ranging variety of very easy to use recovery software programs that allow people searching through hard drives to recover just about any data that's on them. That's why of quality eraser program can come in so handy. The first step to take, then, is to obtain the software and then start putting it to work on the drive.
With software in hand, all it takes is to highlight the drive that is going to be erased and then point the program to the appropriate shredding protocol and file system. Once that's been accomplished, most software programs require only the press of a start button and then they immediately go to work. Make sure to erase any partitions on the hard drive being erased, though.
What this means is that just about every hard drive has several partitions on it. For example, a software eraser program will not be able to erase the partition that is being employed at the time the erasure is taking place. For example, if the computer operating system is on the C drive, the program will be unable to perform the erasure. It will be necessary to carry out a disk partition in that case.
These days, there are more people than ever before out there looking for hard drives they can take and then scan for important data that people have mistakenly believed that they've erased. It is amazing how much information can be gleaned from these drives. Therefore, always consider the use of a quality hard drive eraser program before disposing of any hard drive.
