How do you properly wipe clean an old hard drive?

santer_2

Slightly off topic but if from day one, everything in the recycle bin is removed with CCleaner set for a 3 pass overwrite, and then prior to sale, dban was used a few times, would the data on the hard drive be more difficult to recover?

ickypimp

more difficult but not impossible...

Zanzibar

Yes, effectively impossible. No data recovery company has ever managed to retrieve data after an overwrite wipe on a modern drive. Which? magazine not long ago tried sending a wiped disk to On track (the No 1 data recovery people) and nothing was recoverable - as expected.

There are no government departments with Ninja recovery skills that can recover anything as they use the same commercial companies as everyone else.

There are therories that if you are NASA you can spend impossible amounts of money to microscopically examine the disks surface for fringes of previous recordings but its a fantasy based on a theory involving tests 15 years ago on technology of the time. So this is as likely as you landing on the moon. Actually less so. No one will be recovering anything from your drive after a wipe.