Formatting a HDD

[ColinW]

Never sell a hard disk drive. You will always have something on there that you completely forgot about that you want one day. For the sake of the £20 you might get you are better off keeping it. Having multiple hard drives in your computer is always useful anyway.

[kempo]

Is there any software available for formatting a HDD permanently?

 

I've got 2 hdd's which I'm thinking of selling to a mate, but I don't want to format them for him to run some recover software to extract all my private data

 

hard drives are designed to hold indentations of previous files that can not be removed, it is always recoverable, unless you destroy the drive.

 

even removing the partition completely so there is no partition to scan these drives can be scanned using specific tools to view data that used to be on the drive dont bother selling the drives as you can get a 160 gig for 30 quid these days.

 

why take the risk.....

smash it with a hammer and say your dog ate the drive.

[peterpikefisher]

to really get rid of info on a hdd you have to knacker it using a strong magnetic force

such as you would find in a scrap yard , put said drive under magnet then turn on magnet leave on for 5 Min's ,

this should knacker any drive contents beyond anything available currently on the software recovery scene

however this method is for people wanting to make their old drives unusable..

[corydoras]

Never sell a hard disk drive. You will always have something on there that you completely forgot about that you want one day. For the sake of the £20 you might get you are better off keeping it. Having multiple hard drives in your computer is always useful anyway.

I disagree with you there mate . I love people who sell old drives. My main PC has got 4 40 GB IDE drives as with RAID 0. It is much faster than having one big 160GB drive. I also have an external RAID 0 array of 3 18GB U160 Cheetahs (10,000 RPM jobs). These were all bought from ebay or (SCSI) or rescued from a bin because the were too small (IDE).