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Any good & easy to use software available to wipe an old HDD?

Wangstang

Member
The title pretty much sums it up. I'm looking for for a program that will wipe a drive extremely well. I have a few used drives on there way to me and I want to make sure they are clear of any old data.

If you know of good & easy to use free/shareware available to wipe an old HDD, or even a purchased software, please post!

Thanks
Wes

No offense intened toward the sellers but these days you know who's got what on stored on their computer.
 
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You only need one pass of writes. The easiest is on Vista/7 to do a full format using the regular old built in format you see when you right click the drive. That will write zeros.

If you plan on selling the drive or giving to someone else I always use the manufacturer's diagnosis utility if they offer one. Western Digital and Seagate do. You can at least do the basic quick test to see if it is good condition and WD's software will also write zeros. The only bad thing is it's one drive at a time. The full format in Windows can be done on multiple drives.
 
I prefer Eraser. It is an easy to use windows based software that can wipe drives. You can choose like 20 different methods. However, I picked a simple one.... it wrote random data to the whole drive. You can do more thorough wipes, but I wanted it fast.

http://eraser.heidi.ie/
 
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