Both are designed to leave a drive sparkling clean from a data point of view. Iolo's DriveScrubber sells in a regular edition ($29.99 U.S.) or a professional edition with what I'll call "improved cleaning action" ($89.99). Getting rid of these programs once they've established a foothold on your disk can be an exercise in frustration.īut before you pitch that old or virus-ridden drive into a trash compactor out of paranoia, there is an affordable utility that can help you blow those bytes on your drive to bits. Some especially devious malware can hide itself away in areas of the hard drive that allow it to elude anti-virus cleaning programs or even a full re-formatting of the hard disk.
As a result, there have been a number of stories in the press in recent months about people finding sensitive personal or corporate data on second-hand hard drives that the original owners had supposedly wiped clean with a re-format.Īnd then there's the problem of malware - viruses, as well as some types of adware and spyware that have the camouflage characteristics of a well-written virus. And in many cases we're not talking about software tools found in some sort of high-tech data recovery lab - there are disk utilities for less than $50 at the local software shop that can reconstruct deleted files and formatted hard drives in no time. The problem with deleting files and even a low-level format of the entire hard drive is that people with the right tools and knowledge can piece that data back together. You're selling your old PC or giving it to your neighbour's kid for their school work, but you're a careful sort, so you've formatted the hard drive to make sure that all your old financial records, business e-mails and love letters are wiped out. The Verdict: An easy-to-use utility for wiping a hard disk clean.The Bad: Rudimentary interface must be run from a floppy disk on an X86 PC doesn't work with FireWire external drives and some USB-based hard disks.and German government security specifications for cleaning data from hard drives. The Good: Thorough cleaning process simple to use several levels of cleaning power professional edition meets U.S.Works with: Any hard drive, whether used on a Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac or Sun machine, but the hard disk has to be installed (even temporarily) in a standard X86-based PC to run the drive-wiping software.
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