How to erase hard drive completely??

Before recycling or disposing your old drive do not forget to remove sensitive data and make your hard drive secure. To completely obliterate sensitive data secure erase is another built in feature. Just deleting your files using delete action won’t delete your files from actual location. Formatting and erasing your hard drive will serve the purpose of obliterating sensitive data. Shredders programs will wipe your hard disk drive by covering with unidentified patterns of zeros and ones and this makes the drive unreadable for any software to restore with original data.

Protect your hard disk drives from professional sleuths.

Secure delete standards defined by DoD, Department of Defense 5220.22-M specifics that for secure erase of hard disk, drive sectors should be overwritten thrice with different patterns of zeros and ones and this is one pass. For highly secure data, hard disk drive should be overwritten till seven passes. But a hard disk drive that has undergone one pass is also at safer side because this also leaves the disk in unreadable format and to extract data from these sectors shredders need very costly hardware.

Remember, data are not just assigned physical location on the disk but are permanently associated with virtual memory and reside in some secure part of the hard disk, or in swap files or other locations. Most of us do not know of that disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data because this is disabled by motherboard BIOS. It is linked to Paging concept our operating system uses to store files on the disk by assigning a address and pointer and also swapping the location. Data remains on the disk sector even the data has been deleted from the physical location. Using file recovery programs data is retrieved from these locations. Proper disposition of this physical device is essential other wise you may become victim of various federal laws (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley) and you may then have to give penalties, or may result in civil suits. This secure erase writes on every single track on hard disk. Mac users have “Secure Empty Trash” option under Finder.

Visit my website for the latest on computer related news, erase hard drive software, wipe hard drive erasers, clean hard drive, identity theft.