Securely erase hard drives

There are a variety of methods for erasing hard drives and SSDs prior to redeployment or disposal.

Among these are: 

• Manufacturer's utilities, e.g. SeaTools or WD Data Lifeguard or here
• CCleaner, a free utility for Windows, offers several disk wiping options (see picture below)
• DBAN, available on UBCD
• Acronis, either full product or WD version or Seagate version
• Parted Magic, a spiffy and easy to use Linux distro available onUBCD or Hiren's Boot CD

Most new hard drives and SSDs come with built-in erasure methods. These are often faster than external (e.g. DBAN) methods. If you want to use the built-in method, Parted Magic is the easiest way I know of to do it. There's a Disk Eraser icon right on the desktop. You just have to choose the bottom-most of the menu of methods.

If you want to learn about the manufacturer's secure erase, here's a really good commentary on it:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/62253/what-is-the-difference-between-ata-secure-erase-and-security-erase-how-can-i-en

When the article mentions hdparm, that's what Parted Magic uses to initiate the manufacturer's built-in erase.

As I write this, I'm using Parted Magic to do an enhanced secure erase on a 2TB Western Digital drive. It estimates that it will take 4 hours and 14 minutes to complete.

The article points out another method of "wiping" the drive -- use a good encryption method, and then lose the key. If the encryption method really is well implemented, anyone trying to read the disk will get pretty much random data.

- Jesse, Yellow Crayon LLC