Last updated on August 2nd, 2022 at 10:04 am
Similar to many IT professionals, I often receive requests from friends and family about how to Wipe Clean a Hard Drive of sensitive data from old computers, USB, Floppy disk, etc.
Usually what I suggest, and do myself, is to pull the hard drive out and stock pile it. I know this isn’t always the most practical or secure solution, although it reminds me of my time with a federal government department and how my lab was used to store dead hard drives, but I digress…
Anyways, I did some research and found two programs that seem to be good at wiping hard drives clean. I haven’t used them personally, so I cannot confirm whether or not they work.
Software to Wipe Clean a Hard Drive
Darik’s Boot and Nuke
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/
Fast Wipe
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fwip/
Services to Destroy a Hard Drive
After joining Recast Software, I found out there there are certified service that you can use to certify that your hard drive is wipe clean or even certify that the hard drive was destroyed following ISO standard process. I’m sure that there are others within your area but the one that I used was https://ediinc.ca/. They have Controlled Good Registration too, which is one of the highest cortication you can get for this type of destruction services! This only costed a “few” dollar per hard drive but it was well worth it to know that the drives where certified destroyed. Where as the rest of the hardware was recycled properly.
What do you use to wipe clean a hard drive? Let me know by sending a tweet me. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to my RRS feed to stay on top of the latest trips and tricks. If you have any questions, please feel free to touch base @Garthmj.