Kill your data dead with these tips and tools

January 19, 2014

There are lots of ways to obliterate sensitive data from of your drive: blast furnaces, degaussers (magnet field generators), sledgehammers, and secure-deletion software among them. These tools vary in effectiveness—especially as applied variously to hard drives, solid-state drives, and USB flash drives—and in the subsequent usability of the drive. For the sake of argument (and a more interesting article), let’s assume you’d like to preserve your drive’s functionality. This rules out violence and degaussing, which, though wonderfully effective and perhaps therapeutic, will render a drive useless. Excluding those options leaves you with a choice between software and software-combined-with-firmware methods. Free secure-erase utilities You can easily erase an entire hard drive or SSD by using any of the free utilities listed below. All invoke the secure-erase (sometimes called quick-erase) functions integrated into nearly every ATA/SATA drive produced since 2001. By and large it’s a great feature, but using it on older drives has some potential pitfalls, such as buggy implementations, an out-of-date BIOS, or a drive controller that won’t pass along the commands. You might also need to fiddle with the ATA/IDE/AHCI settings in your BIOS, and in most cases the drive should be mounted internally. Parted Magic’s DriveErase utility makes it a breeze to perform secure erases on your SSDs and HDDs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2084961/kill-your-data-dead-with-these-tips-and-tools.html#tk.rss_reviews