Erasing Data from External Hard Drive

Erasing Data from External Hard Drive - Computer users all over the world use their computer to save songs, movies, Word documents, Office presentations, photos, credit card information etc. on an external hard drive. By connecting an external hard drive to your computer, you will be able to transfer important data into it.

The external hard drive is portable and handy. It allows to access data in it from any computer to which it is attached. So, no wonder most of the people use it as a big pen drive like device. Sometimes even this drive’s memory becomes full. In such situations, the computer users think it is of no use and dispose it. The problem that arises while disposing is data theft which is a serious issue.

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Most of the people just format the drive or delete the data in it and dispose it. Formatting or deleting does not permanently erase the data from the hard drive and it can be recovered by using Data Recovery software. To erase the data permanently from the hard drive, software called Hard Drive Wipe should be used.

Now consider the below scenario. You purchase an external hard drive; let it be 80 GB hard drive. Now you save all personal and business information in it and it works fine. One year passes and the drive becomes full. Now there is no space in the hard drive to store more information. So, you purchase another hard drive of 1 TB memory and transfer the data from the previous hard drive data. You decide to sell the old one.

So, you format the old drive and sell it to someone. The real problem starts here. You may think that the data in the old hard drive has been erased permanently but it is not so. The person who bought the old hard drive can recover your data and information and can use it against you.

Formatting does not delete the actual data and the data can be recovered using an advanced recovery tool. An efficient way to delete all the files permanently is by using Hard Drive Wipe software. This software overwrites all the data saved in quick time. One such software is ‘Stellar Disk Wipe’ which erases all the data from your hard drive permanently. 

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The software works with Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5) and Windows (Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000) only and do not support other versions. The sound feature of the tool is that it wipes unused drive space also.