Most of the people throw bank statements, credit card approval forms, bills etc in Trash without disposing them properly. If these types of valuable documents are not properly disposed, then others may get your identity and can utilize them as they want. When this disposal is related to computers, after constant use of the disk, you may try to dispose the drive and purchase new system or laptop. Business or personal data stored on the disposed disk can be recovered back by using certain recovery programs by hackers. In this situation, you may think how to wipe data beyond recovery. This is possible when you use efficient tool that removes data from drive easily.
Deleting or formatting cannot delete the contents of the data on drive. This is because only the address pointing to the file is deleted from FAT (File Allocation Table) file system. Files deleted using Shift + Delete keys bypasses the Recycle bin. You may think file is not visible in the Recycle bin and it is deleted permanently. However, the file is not deleted permanently and remains intact on the disk itself. The content on the drive is not permanently erased until it is overwritten with new data.
Now a day’s non-volatile hard disk drives (HDD) are being replaced with SSD (Solid State disk) that are used in smart phones. SSD consume less power compared to HDD, as drives need to run mechanical parts for spindling head and performing I/O operations in HDD. SSD can attain high performance than HDD. Hard drives store data on sectors where as SSDs store data in blocks. First copy the content of the block to cache to overwrite the block on SSD. Then wipe the block contents and delete the block from cache. Then overwrite the data to cache and rewrite the block with new data. TRIM command is supported for windows 7 users that can wipe deleted data blocks as soon as the file using the block is deleted. This command improves the endurance and performance of the drive. This informs the SSD about blocks that are no longer used. This makes sure that all blocks have been written at least once. In order to use this command both the drive and operating system should support it. Due to the way it works internally in SSD, file fragmentation or defragmentation does not work with drive. SSDs that have been released in 2009 or later support TRIM command and read data from different areas of memory without facing any delay.
Remo Drive Wipe is a powerful tool that erases data from hard disk using nine sanitizing methods where old data is overwritten with garbage data. This utility provides simple user interface that helps to erase sensitive data from hard drive. This tool carefully overwrites each sector of physical or logical drives. When you download demo version of the tool, you can choose one among the nine sanitizing methods. These methods are classified based on their security levels as low, medium and high where you can select depending upon your level of security.