[Vigilanteman]

Better solution is to have a techie friend (or be one) who knows how to format and copy files over in such a way that the original data cannot be recovered. Then you have something useful to donate to Goodwill.

That's what we do at our office and it has never come back to bite us.

[MarkL]

Better solution is to have a techie friend (or be one) who knows how to format and copy files over in such a way that the original data cannot be recovered. Then you have something useful to donate to Goodwill.

That's what we do at our office and it has never come back to bite us.

While some of my clients (certain DoD contractors, Federal Reserve Bank) required the use of a metal shredder to take care of the hard drives, Kill Disk ( http://www.killdisk.com/ ) has a free product that is perfectly secure for most people. If you need a more secure erase of the data, you can buy their DoD certified version, which does multiple writes over every block on the hard drive (the free version only does a single write over every block).

Mark

[Pilsner]

Better solution is to have a techie friend (or be one) who knows how to format and copy files over in such a way that the original data cannot be recovered. Then you have something useful to donate to Goodwill.

The way to make the contents of your hard drive disappear forever is to mail it, postage paid, with no return address, to:

The Most Honest Member of Congress
The US Capitol
Washington, DC 20510

It will never be seen again.

[Flying Circus]

It takes a lot to truly overwrite data on a disk and that trick requires random overwriting each individual bit multiple times to prevent someone with the time, know-how and right equipment from breaking through and reading the data on a HDD. If you don’t have the time, stick with physical destruction.