Whether you are donating, giving to a friend, or just disposing of a hard drive you should "wipe" the drive. Deleting everything off the drive is not good enough because all deleting really does is mark the storage locations as available or free. A "wipe" program actually writes a bunch of random 1s and 0s to every storage location ensuring what was there is no longer there. So attach the drive to your computer, or install it as a secondary (not boot) drive to your computer. Then run the wipe program. CCleaner has a very capable wipe feature called Drive Wiper. If you don't already have it, I recommend you select the “slim” installer version without the toolbar (scroll down). Or you can use a program like Eraser – which uses DBAN technologies, but with an easy Windows interface. Regardless the program you use, a single pass is plenty good. Only if you had highly sensitive data very determined bad guys would be willing to spend a lot of time trying to recover is more than a single pass necessary.
IMO if one has highly sensitive data on a HDD, better wipe it then destroy it using physical methods to do so (reminds me of Thermite) and forget altruistic intentions for the sake of peace of mind.
Well, that depends on the data. But if so sensitive it needs to be destroyed, I see no reason to worry about wiping it. Put it through a drive shredder and be done with it - and have peace of mind. What we do here if a drive cannot be accessed to be wiped is just drill 3 holes through the drive. Bad guys are opportunist. They are not going to waste any time on a drive with holes drilled through it. And it only takes a few seconds to see if a drive has been wiped - and after that, they will not waste any more time on it either. There are too many easy pickings for them to move on to. One pass with a wipe program will keep anyone from accidentally finding any data, and it will keep any bad guy using any diagnostics or recovery software from finding any data. It would take a highly trained specialist using specialized (and very expensive) forensic analysis equipment on a disassembled drive in a "clean room" for any chance of any data recovery. That really leaves only extremely well funded government spy and law enforcement agencies. But even then, it is highly unlikely they would be able to retrieve enough of any one file to make sense of it. It does not work like seen on TV. But if still concerned, run 3 passes with the wipe program. More than that is just a waste of time.
LOL on the Thermite!!!! to use that you have to have a high velocity rifle. But yes that would work indeed. High power electromagnet or a sledge hammer will work too. Oh ya and any program that wipes the drive has different layers of wipe. If you don't chose the higest rated one and say just do a one swipe, Gov agencies still can undo it and find all the info. A good wipe requires many hours to do so you might as well start it a beddyby time.
Ummm, sorry but not true. The idea it takes many wipes, or even more than 1 wipe is just FUD. Even many years ago when 100MB drives were "bigger than you'll ever need", that was only partially true. They were lucky to recover some of the of the data, but definitely not all. And certainly not in the correct order either since a single wipe clears the file tables too, and the location of the next file cluster (fragment) as well. But today's drives have many times the density levels. That is, they pack many times more data into the same amount of space. That means the individual magnetic particles are many times smaller and require much smaller magnetic fields to orient those particles into the necessary orientation to represent 1s and 0s. Today's drive also use different recording technologies to ensure all writes to the drive are more effective at overwriting any previously stored data. This is to ensure data integrity and minimize data loss, but it also ensures the random 1s and 0s of the single pass wipe is all that can be recovered. Consequently, as I said above, one pass is more than enough to "disorient" the magnetic particles so they no longer represent any previously saved data. Since you didn't believe me when I said this above, see this: You Only Need to Wipe a Disk Once to Securely Erase It. And I don't know what you mean about needing a high velocity rifle to use thermite. That's definitely not true either. I've seen it used in welding many times. I've used for "exothermic bonding" of facility grounds to ground rods. And I was trained to use it in the military in the event we had to quickly evacuate and didn't have time to remove sensitive communications equipment or the contents of a safe. Then we would have to destroy the equipment or contents of the safe with "anti-material" thermite devices. No rifle required.
One pass with CCleaner's overwrite (Drive Wiper) function is all you need. No intelligence agency in the world could ever read what was there.
DBAN is very good - and free. I used it to clean my hosed hard drive. If you're very paranoid, you can erase several times. Once is sufficient. Nearly impossible to recover erased data. I don't see why any one would try.
That's the whole point. No common bad guy is going to waste their time and money unless they know for a fact, you had some very valuable information on that drive worth selling. That leaves it up well funded law enforcement agencies trying to gather evidence of major criminal activity, spy agencies trying to get government secrets, or a competing company (with deep pockets) engaged in corporate espionage. No normal user, hacker, or whiz-kid will be able to recover any data, not one usable byte, after a single pass with a wipe program without the use of very expensive, specialized forensic analysis equipment. And even then, recovery of any bytes of data will be very iffy, partial, fragmented, and in no discernible order. If you are that paranoid and have done nothing illegal, you need to seek professional help.
