Cut-away view of the inside of a hard drive, the round disk are called platters and hold all your data.

Magnets, Degaussers and other x-ray or magnetic techniques do not work, even the large bulk eraser magnets are not effective.

Drilling, smashing, torching and other external damage can still leave parts of the platters in decent shape to retrieve data through forensics.

Expensive shredders are very effective. We recommend shredders if you don't have the time to wipe out the data by software means.

Whether you're disposing of a hard disk drive or simply redeploying it as a new data or system drive, the hard disk drive needs to be wiped of old data. This means you should do more than the traditional wipe of the hard disk drive, if you wipe data, it can be recovered. The hard disk drive should be scrubbed with a disk cleaning utility which will definitely wipe the data off your hard disk drive.

Using the operating system's "delete" command doesn't actually wipe out anything. It simply marks the space on the hard disk drive as "available" so the operating system can re-use it. This is fast, but it leaves all the data in place on the hard disk drive, easy to recover. A disk wipe program, on the other hand, actually writes over the hard disk drive data to make it unreadable.

Because on a basic level, if you a wipe drive it only writes over the disk once, it is fast; however, an expert cracker with the right software and enough patience may be able to recover at least some of the material on the disk even after you wipe the hard disk drive. Multi-pass scrubbing makes it much less likely that anything readable will be left on the hard disk drive that you used to wipe it.

Basically it comes down to the level of security you need. If the information on the hard disk drive is extremely sensitive, such as customer information or credit card numbers, our method to wipe a drive takes to use a multi-pass scrubbing technique is probably appropriate.

Otherwise, if you are going to re-use the wiped hard disk drive for your own use then basic cleaning should be enough, however, if you are going to dispose of the hard disk drive by donation, resale or junking, a multi-pass wipe is highly recommended or you should use our wipe hard disk drive method.

| WIPE DRIVE | ERASE DRIVE | DESTROY HARD DRIVE | SANITIZE DRIVE | CLEAN HARD DRIVE | ERASE DATA | WIPE DATA | CLEAN DATA
____________________________________________________________

| CLEAN DATA | ERASE DRIVE | WIPE DRIVE | ERASE DATA | SANITIZE DRIVE | CLEAN HARD DRIVE | WIPE DATA | DESTROY HARD DRIVE
______________________________________________________