Tools to Make Your Hard Drive Forget Its Past

The New York Times circuits section is running an article entitled Tools to Make Your Hard Drive Forget Its Past. The title is a bit misleading, since it only lists the tools to need to reformat your drive to start from scratch with a fresh installation of your software.

If you really want to erase your hard drive to preserve the confidentiality of your information before you sell or ditch your PC, you need a toolkit that truly destroys the data that is written on the magentic media. A number of products are available on the market that at least purport to meet rigorous standards, such as those set by the US Department of Defence (See Google Search: DoD 5220.22-M). The Canadian RCMP recommends, in their Hard Drive Secure Information Removal and Destruction Guidelines, that hard drives containing Secret or Top Secret data be disintegrated into itty bitty pieces (smaller than 1/4 of an inch).