How To Completely Erase Data From Your Hard Drives, SSDs And Thumb Drives
There may be many reasons why you would want to erase your hard drive, it may be that you wish to change over to another operating system, or you may want to sell or pass on your existing hard drive to someone else, if you are planning to purchase a new hard drive. When you part with your existing hard drive you do not want to have to worry about personal or sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, cases of identity theft have come about through people finding this type of information on old discarded hard drives.
The difference between erasing files and wiping data is that erasing files frees up the file space available for use in the future whereas wiping data clears space on the storage device, data wiping is useful to maintain security of information when disposing of hard drives. The only way to completely get rid of information on the hard drive is to overwrite it with new information. If files are deleted from the computer it is still possible to recover these files with the use of data recovery software, unless the space on the hard drive is overwritten with new information.
Information saved to a Sold State Drive is saved in blocks of data rather than sections as with computer files. To delete a SSD block the contents first have to be saved to a cache, then the blocks have to be wiped, delete the contents of the blocks saved to the cache and overwrite with new information and rewrite the block with new data.
TRIM is a technology that is supported by Windows 7 and can be used to help to prevent the performance of the SSD whilst files are being frequently changed. TRIM provides an increase in both security and performance from wiping data. For systems that do not support TRIM, wiper.exe or secure erase version 4 can be used.
One method of wiping the hard drive securely is to obtain a product from a vendor such as Hitachi or Samsung that allows the hard drive to be securely wiped, these products are called zero fill software. The software fills the whole of the hard drive surface with zeros. Although zero filling does not meet Government data sanitation standards, the process does overwrite the whole drive to give the security of the data being irrecoverable.
There are programs available that allow drives to be data wiped, the most common one for hard drives is DBAN, however some data wipe programs only support the hard drive and are not much good when it comes to wiping flash memory cards and USB flash drives. Programs such as Roadkil’s disk wipe are more useful for wiping other data storage devices as well as the hard drive itself.
Why Erasing Files Is Not Enough
Erasing some content or file from the hard drive does not ensures that it will be removed from the storage device also. When you delete a file from the computer it is not really gone unless the areas of the disc it uses are overwritten by new data. If you normally use the delete function of the Windows, it is sent to the Recycle Bin. When it is deleted by Shift +Delete is escapes the Recycle Bin, and the space occupied by the file is available for other files.
While the SSDs store data in blocks rather than in sectors as compared with magnetic storage. And TRIM is a technology that wipes out deleted data blocks as soon as the file using the blocks is deleted. TRIM is supported by Windows 7. So disk wiping is a security feature and a performance improvement step to take.
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