is there a computer hard drive heavy duty shredder available?

Question

what section of the yellow pages would it be listed under? i don't want old personal information like cc and ss #s recovered by hackers if i sell it.

Answer 1

Yes, its called C4 :) Works wonders

Answer 2

If you're going to sell your PC or simply give it to someone you should definitely clean up that hard drive.

Try going to www.download.com and search for the following programs.

Killdisk
This program is FREE and will completely erase your hard drive by rewriting over the entire disk surface. The only potential issue with Killdisk is the fact that it erases everything (including the OS, etc.) If that is what you want to accomplish then Killdisk will do it, but it is very slow. A 40G hard drive takes about 3 hours to rewrite.

Evidence Eliminator
This is a great program. It is very versatile and performs a military style rewrite. The really good thing about this one is that it will not rewrite over any files, data, programs, etc. that you want to retain. It will only write 1's and 0's where a file, data, etc. has been identified as a deleted item, and those areas on the HD that are empty of data. The problem with this one is that it is not free. This one costs $75 the last I saw. I bought it a year or so ago and I use it frequently to clean up my HD of any residual data that I've deleted. I know it's expensive, but I do recommend this one.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

get a few powerfully magnets, or put them onto top of a microwave, and this will wipe the data for sure, since that will wipe anything on the drives, and make the drives useless.
hope this helps. since there is not a service i know of. that just wipe harddrives.. there is many programs out ther that write lots of 1's and 0's to the drive.
so no data can ever be recovered since the data has been replaced by the 1's and 0's
hope this helps
Paultech.

Answer 4

Go to the manufaturer of HDD's web site and download a 'zero fill' tool.

I know Seagate and Western Digital both have these as I use them at work; pretty sure Maxtor and IBM/Hitachi have them too.

This will change every block to 0, completely wiping the hard drive. Can take a while to run though.

Answer 5

For just one hard drive you are best off using a ship in shredding service. They use an industrial shredder to shred your drive and recycle the bits. I should cost you less than $20 for the service. Most local shredding services don't have the shredder designed for metal.

Answer 6

Magnets will effectively destroy your hard drive, low level format tools are unreliable since you can still use a data recovery tool to find what was on it. Only one program I can recommend and have used that wipes the hard drive and whatever is deleted, stays deleted. Paragon Disk Wiper. It will take a long time to erase the data because it does 4 passes. It took 3.9 hours to erase my 80GB SATA drive.

Answer 7

Take the cover off and throw all of the parts in a nice fire. The heat will destroy the magnatism- giving random orientation, and if it's good enough will melt the aluminum platters. I doubt if anything could be recovere.

Answer 8

all you need to do is reformat and select an option to write 0's to the drive you should be able to do up to a triple write and that will cover up any old data on the drive

Answer 9

You could low level format the drive and then add one file to it. That would erase the drive and be 99% safe

Hope that helps

Answer 10

you can wipe the disk 1st using killdisk or if your hard drive is western digital use date lifeguard downloadable from http://www.westerndigial.com for free once that is done take out you frustration on it with a large hammer