Wiping your drives COMPLETELY

Is it completely safe for a hdd to be wiped every so often and I mean including the HPA?

 

I don't know, personally. I've never tried to put a drive back in use, after wiping with BCWipe Total Wipeout...which does DCO and HPA. Care to try it for us?

PD

 

Yeah, but the DCO and HPA aren't accessible by normal wiping software. We're wondering if wiping those areas basically makes the drive unsuitable for further use. I guess an email to Jetico would get the answer.

PD

 

id rather go with something opensource , anything new in that area as of recent? , dont really trust bcwipes custom algorithms , heard rumours here and there

 

I have some old hdd's that I don't care about so I may try it lol

Can someone refresh my memory, what other software can wipe the HPA of hdd's?

 

Erasing a HPA and resetting the DCO to factory defaults will not render a hdd useless, in my (anecdotal) experience.
With a linux liveCD and 'hdparm' commands, you can do all that. You can remove or create a HPA at your wish.
(Mind you, with specific hdparm commands you can totally wreck a drive, specifically it's firmware but that requires being careless or of course intent).
From my own experience, a HPA usually hosts system restore data so removing it will make sure that you can't restore that way anymore.
Resetting the DCO will make all data on disk unreadable (for an OS) but that's the goal anyway in this case.

So imo, removing the HPA is like a complete reformat and resetting the DCO, not actually wiping it, makes the disc factory fresh.
Not sure if a hdd will work if you actually wipe the DCO instead of just resetting it.

 

I've used Total Wipe Out with erase DCO & HPA enabled and re-used the drive. Checked the drive and there was no trace of anything after so as far as I'm concerned Total Wipe Out is a solid product.

Off course always disconnect your ethernet/wireless before wiping just in case.

Now their BCwipe product is questionable I think, I woke up one morning and the wiping scheme had changed. I don't know how but it did change. I think the fact that BCwipe tries to connect to the internet for updates concern's me. Maybe a simple way for a backdoor to be put on your PC, you never know. They say they are certified by the USA Military for use, which means they would have to adhere to the NSA will and demands for backdoor access. This is why I don't think BestCrypt can be trusted either.

Summing up Total Wipe Out looks like it's 100% the rest of Jetico's software has question marks.