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The Most Secure Way To Wipe A Computer Hard Drive Easy And Free


NYCguy

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For an SSD, issuing a secure wipe command to the drive does the trick instantly. For a regular hard drive, dd on Linux does an adequate job. If not sure, smash the drive to microscopic bits as hinted at above.

Smashing it to pieces may be the best thing to do.  All of the software out there that I know of doesn't do the trick if someone really wanted to recovered information that was supposedly erased...

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Smashing it to pieces may be the best thing to do.  All of the software out there that I know of doesn't do the trick if someone really wanted to recovered information that was supposedly erased...

Wanna give it a try? I'm pretty sure some software simply do a shoddy job of it, but there are a few basic software tools that most people overlook that will do the job right.

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Well are we talking about conventional techniques that can stop even the most sophisticated recovery techniques?

Anything that's not a simple delete from the file manager should work. For SSDs, the secure erase command is guaranteed to destroy data irrecoverably within seconds due to the nature of their inner workings. Conventional platter-based hard drives can also be easily wiped like SSDs if they are of the self-encrypting variety. For all other platter-based hard drives, overwriting the entire raw disk with null bytes will do the trick. Though many security experts recommend methods like overwriting with random data 35 times, even they will admit that a single pass of null bytes will afford sufficient protection. As far as I know, it's unheard of for any organization to recover data from even a single pass of overwriting.

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