Hard drive purchase

Pobby

I need to buy a new hard drive. My puter is about 4 years old and I am using XP as my os. There seems to be many hard drives for sale . I was thinking about 250 gigs. What else do I need to know please?

Wherryman

You will need to have a look at the connection cables to the harddisk, it could be PATA (big wide 40 pins) or SATA (a lot smaller only 7 pins)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Advanced_Technology_Attachment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Pobby

The other question is that I would like to securely delete any info on the old drive as credit card info could be found.

isofa

To securely wipe the old HD (well as secure as possible, nothing is 100% guaranteed, as forensic methods can recover even well deleted data), use the free and excellent DBAN.

Wherryman

Well if you want to securly delete all the information so nobody can ever read it the only way is to pound it with a large hammer for about five minutes, job done!

But if you want to keep your old harddisk there are lots of free programs out there that should wipe all the data off your disk, just as example,
Eraser Nuke option:- http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

Pobby

I have been told that these data wipers can take an age to remove info from a disk. Is that true?

Wherryman

Short answer, Yes.

It's all depandant on the capacity of the disk and the method used to over write the old data, it could take hours and hours, just leave the process to run overnight, that should be long enough.

Pobby

No I am told by s.m.a.r.t that the hard drive is about to fail so I guess it`s a mechanical problem. Think that I might use the hammer option.

isofa

Wherryman wrote: »

Well if you want to securly delete all the information so nobody can ever read it the only way is to pound it with a large hammer for about five minutes, job done!

But if you want to keep your old harddisk there are lots of free programs out there that should wipe all the data off your disk, just as example,
Eraser Nuke option:- http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

Forensic rigs can easily extract data from physically damaged drives and drives subject to high temperature fires too. :rolleyes:

[Deleted User]

isofa wrote: »

To securely wipe the old HD (well as secure as possible, nothing is 100% guaranteed, as forensic methods can recover even well deleted data), use the free and excellent DBAN.

Yep, a single wipe with DBAN is enough.

isofa

anewhope wrote: »

Yep, a single wipe with DBAN is enough.

Totally agree - nothing is better, and it's open source, and free!