Drive eraser hardware

[Mark]

DBAN (Derricks Boot and Nuke) is all you need.  Free.  In fact, there is even a little overhead in that sinc all you really need is the wipe utility, but DBAN is convenient and free.  Unless you need PERC RAID drivers..

[Gene Foraker]

As long as you are going to get serious, CCleaner has a wipe utility which you can choose to either wipe the entire disc or just the free space.    That would enable you to delete all info other than the OS and then wipe the free space on a PC before donating to a church or school.

[Mark]

As long as you are going to get serious, CCleaner has a wipe utility which you can choose to either wipe the entire disc or just the free space.    That would enable you to delete all info other than the OS and then wipe the free space on a PC before donating to a church or school.

Not sure how confident I'd be in CCleaner's wipe.  I just read about it on their website, but the fact that it's leaving anything intact would make me feel less than secure.  It seems that it leaves the file system intact.  It even mentions that the Drive Wiper tool leaves the disk formatted.  I wonder if it wipes it and then formats it?  Maybe this is good for most, but I like the DOD standard full nuke.

[Hans Manhave]

Maybe I should offer a service where people can mail me the drives to be destroyed and I can create a video of the event?  Drives are so cheap now, everybody can buy one for $60 or less at BestBuy and put a free Linux distro on it.  Nobody likes Windows or Internet Exploder anyway.  One would have to pay for shipping and insurance against loss/exploitation etc.