So you’ve bought a new computer and you’ve got all of those most important things moved over to it from your old computer. Things like your Pictures, your iTunes, all of the random Word and Excel files that seem to fill up a My Documents folder, your Quicken files, your Microsoft Money Files, your Email, you know, all the important stuff. Now you’re ready to get rid of your old computer, but first you need to get rid of all of those important things from that old computer so that weird guy in your neighborhood that picks through your trash at night looking for treasures doesn’t have access to all of your private files. Just deleting the files doesn’t quite cover it, anybody can Google “recover permanently deleted files” and find out that those deleted files are really only annoyingly-difficult-to-get-to, not really deleted. So what are the options?
The Shredder
One of the more entertaining ways to make sure all of your data is gone is to go with a company like 2trg in Louisville and Cincinatti. They offer Hard Drive Shredding as one of their services and they will even let you watch while your drive is put to death in the most gruesome way imaginable. It looks something like this:
Chances are slim that anyone will want to take all of those little pits of Hard Drive and put them back together just to get your data.
The Degausser
For something a little less dramatic you could always go with a Hard Drive Degausser. A standard hard drive is nothing more than series of round platters that have been coated with a magnetic material. Your computer aligns these magnetic particles in particular ways to store your data. A Degausser undoes this, it reverses the magnetic polarity of the magnetic particles. Sounds technical doesn’t it? The Degausser does to the data what the Shredder did to the drive. A Degausser works like this:
Now you have an easy to clean up dead Hard Drive instead of little, bitty, pieces. Both are equally dead though.
Secure Erase
For something a little more cost effective, virtually all Hard Drives made in the last 10 years have a little piece of practially unknown software stored on them called Secure Erase. This is an NSA Compliant security erasure program designed by the Nation Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Because of the chance, however small it was, that this software could be triggered by a virus, NIST insisted that Secure Erase be disabled by default. Fortunately for us, there are free applications that enable this hidden gem and allow us to take care of all of our data on our own. There are some great articles out there on with detailed instructions on how to do just that, I won’t post that here for the fear that someone may actually try it and then blame me when their Hard Drive is blank. The only problem with this option is that there isn’t a good video to go with it.
My Recommendation
I recommend a little of each. Obviously the first two are not very cost effective for the average home user, but there’s no sense in not being cautious. If you really want to make sure that no one can get to your data, then here’s what I do. First I use a program called Hard Drive Eraser. It’s free and pretty easy to use, though I would caution you to never install it on your main computer…accidents happen. Second I like to use a power drill and bore holes through the drive around the area that the platters are located. It’s probably not necessary, but I like to be sure. Lastly I take the drive apart. This isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, but it adds just one more layer of defense against anyone that might want to use those drives, and the magnets that you get out of a hard drive are really strong and make good refridgerator magnets.
Do I do this on all of my drives? No, that would be silly, but I do recommend doing this for drives with business or financial or medical information on them. It’s the smart thing to do and it’s low cost.
What did I miss? Let me know if you have any interesting ways of getting rid of an old hard drive. Leave your comments below.
Dennis Edmondson Jr
Computing Concepts LLC
