I ran some tests a few years ago and settled on the freeware Darik's
Nuke & Boot. I had a few spare drives laying around and just for fun
stick them into my scanning PC and tried to wipe them. I used Image
Recall 3to try to recover files from the drives after wiping. Most of
the wipe programs I tried were ineffective. Some worked on the bulk of
the files but left hundreds of files on the drive, many seemed to do
nothing at all. I even tried wiping, repartitioning, reformatting,
wiping again - stuff still came back. Darik's was the only one I tried
that got rid of everything... It boots into linux, IIRC, does a low
level format. I think that if you do anything from within Windows the OS
always leaves a bit of the drive untouched. But that won't work for my
3TB drive - it would take hours to wipe and it only is functional for
about 10 minutes at a time.
Mark
On 11/11/2011 11:37 AM, Darren Addy wrote:
For the truly paranoid:
Simply formatting a drive is like removing the Table of Contents/Index
pages from a book but leaving all of the pages with information still
there, if someone wants to look for it. Sure the possibility of
someone really wanting to is small, but what the truly paranoid are
looking for is not data obfuscation but data DESTRUCTION:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/organization/personalfiles.aspx
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/free-data-destruction-software.htm
Darren Addy
Kearney, Nebraska
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