Hard Drive Erase Software. Requirements For Selling Hard Drives

I've purchased a hard drive docking station that holds 2.5, 3.5 SATA and IDE hard drives. I want to erase the information within the hard drives I've collected and start selling them. There are many free data-erase software programs out there but I want to have something that says it is certifiable. I don't mind paying for the software to allow this but many of the ones I have researched say they are only good for use 3 times and then you must buy the software again (this is no good, as I have 60 hard drives). Anyone knowledgeable about this?

Here is an article 5 Free Programs to Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

I'm thinking of going with this software How to erase hard drive? Video presentation

The professional pack says it is unlimited and operates under 17 standards.

I've tried that and it was so slow.But it could be because i was running on a old 600 mhz laptop

Originally Posted by NMatheson

Hi Jeremiah,

Check out About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke. Deriks boot and nuke is what I have used and works very very well as far as I know. It's open source and free for use.

*edit - sorry, I dont think it is certified so never mind that.

I use Darik's Boot And Nuke and it works great - Its easy to use

hard drive erase | eBay
I've found some programs on ebay.

What is the importance of certifying the Hard Drive is clean to the Buyer?
When they format the drive for their system, wouldn't any information be lost?

Wouldn't the party supplying you with the Drives be the one wanting the certification?

Or am I not understanding the operation?

Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

I use this program Disk Wipe - Free software I think as far as certified goes. That comes from you saying your going to wipe the drives not the software used to wipe it.

I'm thinking that if anyone who donated a computer to me had their identity stolen were to bring me into a court of law and asked me to prove the hard drive within their computer was not responsible for their identity theft I would need to either show that their hard drive was destroyed or professionally wiped. This was my reasoning for wanted to meet the dod standards.

I've always used manufacturers disk tools software, every manufacturer has free ones, although some (like older Fujitsu) were harder to come by, even then, you can boot it in with another manufacturers drive as slave, and use the same tools on off brands. Every major HDD manufacturer has these freely accessible for DL from their website. If I was concerned about a virus seeping over a format, I'd let it write zeros to the entire drive, but later found that to be unnecessary. These are good enough to keep anything from "going over" a format, onto a new installation. If you are totally concerned about someone hacking info off of one beyond this, beat it to pieces with a hammer, run it through a shredder, burn it in an incinerator, and keep the ashes under your pillow (I'd never attempt to reuse a drive with such secret info on it, and if you are asking about it here, you have no business being in such a drives possession ; )

Thanks for the comments everyone. I've dowloaded a free program from killdisk and used it to wipe a hard drive of mine (took about an hour). I've decided i'm going to go with their professional pack for $49.99 as it allows you to do a couple extra things that would be nice as well as passes some 17 security standards. I think the free version would do just as well, but, I've had my share of civil court suites from my landscaping business and I think I will feel better spending the $50. I also want to test market offering this service of wiping data for a fee and providing the customer with a printout. I don't see any large demand for it, but I do have a couple computer shops I do business with who might outsource some work to me.

While reasearching wipe software I found a couple cool products. Some wipe software allows you to wipe everything but the opperating system which would be awesome if you had your hands on newer laptop/computer that you wanted to sell.

I use DBAN. You can do multiple hard drives. I have wiped over a 1000 computers with this software. Reliable, quick and easy to use

I noticed CCleaner has a driver wipe. Never used it but noticed it on there when i was doing a reg scan

I use and recommend DBAN myself. It's the only free program out there that will do multiple drives at once. There have been plenty of times I've had 10 - 12 drives wiping simultaneously on my wipe system. I only recommend doing that many drives at once on a system with high BUS bandwidth. Very handy.

If anyone knows of another wiper that will handle multiple drives at the same time I'd like to know about it.