Best external HD cleaner software?

apc

I need to really clean some HDs - like govt clean. Any suggested software?

Jstas

If you need government level of clean, the government has utilities available to achieve that. But then again, the government considers "cleaning" to be a through degaussing.

If you need software, Google is your friend.

edbert

http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

I have used this before. Seems to work well. I have another one installed on my computer at home but I forget what it was. I think the hard drive cleaner portion was part of another program. I'll let you know when I get home this evening.

BigMac

This one is free and works very well. I had a friend try to recover data that I deleted with this using hardware recovery which is much more in depth than software recovery. Needless to say he did not recover anything. I still use it today. You have the option to overwrite files,delete whole drives,do a secure move and so on. You can choose the level of removal as well; starting at 1x overwrite to the 35x Gutmann method. If you go this route d/l the Eraser 5.8.6a version, not the beta version as it has not been tested to see if 'everything' is erased.

http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

polktiger

wild thought, can you use an electromagnet like you used to use on casette tapes and floppy disks

ninerbj

Am I missing something? Why would you want to do this?

edbert

It deletes any traces of your old information (and possibly sensitive info like bank accounts, ssn, etc.) if you are planning on sellling a hard drive or old computer with the hard drive. Other than that, I don't know of any real reason.