In today's fast–paced world, one must wonder, everything changes so quickly. It seems just like yesterday when I used to have a hard disk of 10 GB. And these days, my laptop has got 500 GB of hard disk. The fact of the matter is, with changing times you can never be sure as to how much is too much. So, there are times when you have feel the need to sell off your hard disk to upgrade to a newer and sleeker one. As a usual practice, when you sell any of your storage media you format it completely so that the prospective buyer cannot recover any confidential, whatsoever, data from the hard disk. However, such data can be recovered, and misused, by some unsocial elements. For such purposes, you should use a third-party  drive wipe software to wipe off the data completely from the hard disk.

There are various reasons when you need to wipe off your hard drive. They are:

• Donating your system

• Selling your hard drive or any other storage media

• Your organization has gone bankrupt and want to sell off the systems.

• Your organization is in the process of upgrading the systems and want to exchange the systems with the hardware vendor.

• Your system is virus infected, which is not getting away even after formatting the system.

In a practical scenario, you would format (actually reformat) the hard drive using the in-built formatting methods. However, as suggested earlier in the article, the data can be recovered from the formatted hard drive. This is made possible as in formatting only the address tables are removed and data itself remains in the hard disk, which is of course can be recovered using any third-party data recovery software.

So, to safely remove all the confidential data from your hard disk you should use a third-party data eraser software. Such tools are able to reformat the hard drive using various wiping algorithms and several passes. It is made possible by rewriting the binary information in the hard drive.