Permantly Delete Data From Your Hard Drive

Posted: January 16, 2014

Storing sensitive data on hard drives can pose a security risk. Attempting to delete the information can be challenging. These programs can help users delete unwanted files easily.

Storing sensitive data on hard drives can pose a security risk. Attempting to delete the information can be challenging. These programs can help users delete unwanted files easily.

Jon L. Jacobi, freelance writer for PC World, shares some of the best file deleting software around.

Kill your data dead with these tips and tools

There are lots of ways to obliterate sensitive data from of your drive: blast furnaces, degaussers (magnet field generators), sledgehammers, and secure-deletion software among them. These tools vary in effectiveness—especially as applied variously to hard drives, solid-state drives, and USB flash drives—and in the subsequent usability of the drive.

For the sake of argument (and a more interesting article), let’s assume you’d like to preserve your drive’s functionality. This rules out violence and degaussing, which, though wonderfully effective and perhaps therapeutic, will render a drive useless. Excluding those options leaves you with a choice between software and software-combined-with-firmware methods.

Read the entire article Kill Your Data Dead With These Tips and Tools on PC World.