> Wiping Your Hard Disk Drive Clean

 

In this world of increasing E-wastes, there is one thing everyone must be aware of , but actually not is. If you decide to sell, donate or throw away a hard disc that once stored all of your important data, that may include bank account statements, e-books, Ids etc, what would you do? Ofcourse you are not dumb to just give it away. You will delete your data, format it and then give it. Isn’t it?? But Don’t you know that these deleted data can be easily recovered like I said in an earlier post? Yes. Your data is thus vulnerable to data theft and may lead to much more catastrophes.

In 2003 two MIT students purchased 158 used disk drives from various locations and found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, medical reports, detailed personal and corporate financial information, and several gigabytes worth of personal e-mail and pornography on those drives.


So , I suggest you to get ahead with the more secure technologies available here. You must wipe clean your hard disk or other storage media before you loose its ownership. First you need a disk wiping tool. There are many free and paid ones available out there. For eg, “WipeDrive 5″ is available for $39.95 . That may be a bad news for you, but the good news is , the free ones are also efficient enough.

You may probably think , what’s in this or how they differ. There is a wiping algorithm in it , which may or may not differ in each software. Most algorithms overwrite every data with a number , either zero or one and then have to format it. The more you do this, the more safer it is. Disk wiping software wipes everything you have and haven’t ever known of, master boot record, partition table, and each and every sector of the hard drive. There is a government standard for wiping , DoD 5220.22-M , but it is just a medium secure remedy, specifying 3 iterations to write over hard drive 6 times. Each iteration has 2 passes, where 1 and 0 are overwritten on the data.There is a method called as Gutmann method which wipes by writing a series of 35 patterns over the region to be erased.

There is no need for you to know more about the working, cause, you are not coding one, you are using one. Back to the softwares, there is Darik’s Boot and Nuke (called DBAN), which is a very high level security wiping software, which is free. There are more, like “Kill disk” , that supports 17 security standards.

Wiping takes a lot of time. Killdisk takes about 12 hours to complete 1 pass of 13 gb data. So you must be start wiping a week before the giveaway. But, Time ain’t precious than our data!!