You Need To Overwrite Your Hard Drive Seven Times With Random Data To Make Data Unrecoverable

Conventional wisdom holds that you need to write and rewrite a hard drive numerous times with garbage before it will be totally unrecoverable by forensics experts. That’s not exactly the case: We overwrote a hard drive just once with zeroes and asked the recovery gurus at DriveSavers if they could rescue it. The answer: They couldn’t save a single bit. Now we don’t pretend to know about the hardcore resources of groups like the NSA, so if you’re that paranoid about being branded a terrorist because of a deleted PDF of The Anarchist’s Cookbook discovered on a used drive you bought on eBay, by all means, spend a week wiping that drive. But if you’re just casually recycling a drive for resale or donation, a single pass will do the trick and will save you literally days of time waiting for the wipe to finish.

Run a program like KillDisk (www.killdisk.com) and select a single zeroes-only pass.