• What product can I use to safely sanitize my old hard drive of any sensitive data?

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  • What products or best practices are there for completely removing all data from a hard drive? Is there a software based solution that is better than microwaving or physically disassembling the drive? What about with solid-state (flash) drives?

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    Question by Oliver Hulland
    05/02/2011

DBAN http://www.dban.org/. Free, and very thorough. Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBAN

Answer by derek murawsky
05/23/2011

Maybe Ontrack Eraser can do the trick. My dad use it in his work, collecting computers from companies who wants to donate there old computers to Africa. They use the software because the company behind the software provides a certificate that stats that all data have been completely destroyed. They even say that it is better to use this software then to physically destroy the hard drive, because the drive can be reconstructed and analyzed.. But other then that, I don't not nothing about it.

Answer by anders johansen
05/23/2011

Connect the drive to any Mac and use Disk Utility to do a single, 7 or 35 pass 0 fill of your drive. Attempting to restore the drive will just recover zeroes.

Answer by dave dash
05/23/2011

a large hammer

Answer by chloe501
05/23/2011

The 7/35 pass options are called DoD standard but those were based on old paper about recovering data from MFM and RLL drives. Modern drives are completely different and can't be recovered as simply.

A single pass of zeros will be sufficient for spinning drives. Note that modern drives will automatically relocate bad sectors as it finds them and the zero pass won't write to those sectors, old data may remain on those sectors even with the 7/35 pass options as the drive skips over them anyway.

If you just want to keep people from using computer based recovery tools from getting data off your drive then a single zero pass will suffice. If you want to prevent more, then slag it, there are no ways to guarantee full erasure of absolutely all data.

Answer by kvanh
05/31/2011

Go with the low-tech approach and proven method....just take a hammer to it and save yourself the uncertainty that the software worked.

Answer by hobbes
06/01/2011

The only product I've found so far that can delete free space from SSD is O&O SafeErase 5:

http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/products/oosafeerase/

Answer by stinklington
06/07/2011

methylethylkeytone bath or and not, not simultaneously_, fire.

Answer by chloe501
06/07/2011

Visit this link to get Best solution to your problems http://www.easyrecovery.co.uk

Answer by anthonyohare
12/30/2013
Answer by Captain Packrat
06/10/2014

Visit this link to get Best solution to your problems http://www.manchester-datarecovery.co.uk

Answer by tonyohare2014
07/01/2014

Useful information in this blog, like this one must be maintained so I'll put this one on my bookmark list of memory card recovery. Thanks for this wonderful post and hoping to post more of this. Visit this link to get Best solution to your problems http://www.manchester-datarecovery.co.uk

Answer by tonyohare2014
07/01/2014
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