what are the best hard drive erasers?
mike s asked:
What is the best hard drive erasers out there to erase secure documents from hard drives, Are there some free ones that will do a good job also?
What is the best hard drive erasers out there to erase secure documents from hard drives, Are there some free ones that will do a good job also?
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February 9th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
To my knowledge, ALL hard drive manufacturers who sell their hard drives at such places as Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, Wal*Mart, etc., include software to zero out their hard drives (low-level format them) in the box with the hard drive; otherwise, they offer such software from their respective websites.
There are plenty of free programs to zero out a hard drive. Some even offer DoD-level cleansing and Gutman-level cleansing (with 35 overwrites to each bit of the hard drive).
Or, you could download many of the various small GNU/Linux-based Live CDs that offer the SHRED utility.
Burn the ISO to a blank CD. Boot from that CD. Open a terminal shell. Log-in as the Super User.
Type:
shred –force –iterations=40 –verbose –zero /dev/sda
On the keyboard, press:
Enter
Go away for the weekend while your hard drive is scrubbed clean.
Of course /dev/sda may not represent your computer’s hard drive. It may be /dev/hda. Odds are, it’s one or the other.
February 12th, 2010 at 5:15 am
I like Window Washer (published by Webroot) and CCleaner (published by Piriform).
CCleaner is freeware.
February 15th, 2010 at 11:35 am
An electromagnet. I’ve worked for secure organizations and it is second to none. I can tell you that a lot of simple apps out there that overwrite an area 5 times, you can still piece together some information. If they’re really “secure documents” then don’t think they’re secure with an application you’ll download. If they’re just medium private documents, I would suggest ActiveKillDisk.