Getting Rid Of Old Hard Drives
June 3rd, 2006
Back when I was in the Air Force, the only approved method of wiping data from a hard drive was to disassemble it and break the platters with a hammer. But if you do as this couple did, and give your computer up to be recycled, I’d suggest at least making a boot disk and reformatting the drive. A better level of security, however, can be found by using Eraser. For certain private information, I go that extra step and use encryption. And for the über-paranoid, there’s whole-disk encryption. (Windows Vista is supposed to have built-in disk encryption, but I wouldn’t trust it to not have a back door.)
