subject: Permanently Erasing Data From Secondary/external Hard Drive [print this page] In todays world, most of the computer users save their favorite songs, movies, important Word documents, credit card information, and similar data on an external hard drive. An external hard drive can be attached to your computer and allow you to transfer your important data into it. The drive is portable and handy, and allows you to access data from anywhere in the world. However, as the time passes by, the hard drive also becomes full. In such situations, most of the computer users buy a new hard drive and dispose off the previous one. The main problem here arises is of data theft, as most users dispose of their drives by either formatting the drive or by just deleting the data. These two processes do not permanently delete the data from the hard drive and there is always is always a way of recovering data using a data recovery software. For complete safety, the user should opt for Hard drive wipe software that can permanently erase the data.
To elaborate this further, consider a practical scenario where you purchase an external hard drive (with 80 GB storage capacity) to save all your business-related information. However, after an year, the drive becomes full and there is no space left in the hard drive. So, you purchased another hard drive (with 1TB storage capacity) and transferred the previous hard drive data into new hard drive. Now you format the old hard drive and sell it to some other user. However, the question here arises, is it safe to sell your hard drive after formatting?
The answer for the above question is 'No'. Formatting only deletes the file system entries, not the actual data. The data can be recovered using an advanced data recovery tool. The purchaser of your hard drive can connect the drive to the system and can view all your business information.
A confirmed way to permanently delete all the files is by using an effective third-party Hard Drive Wipe application. These Data Eraser Software overwrites all the digitally saved data in one go.
Stellar Disk Wipe erases all your personal, professional, or confidential data from your hard drive permanently. The Data Eraser Software is available with Boot CD that allows you to select hard drive from which the user needs to wipe the data. Designed for Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5)and Windows (Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000), the tool also wipes unused drive space.
