Use eRazer to Wipe Drive?
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Craig Ball has a review of a small tool called the WiebeTech Drive eRazer , which is a relatively small, easy to use, device that wipes a hard drive and overwrites it with zeroes. While there are better, and even free, tools available to accomplish the same result when you want to wipe a drive before giving it away, or other situations, most of them do require a bit more technical know-how than the typical home user has. The Drive eRazer, though, is pretty straightforward, even if it does have it’s own issues, as Craig points out.
Makes me wonder though, if there isn’t a market for something like this, that can simply take a hard drive, connect it to a small device, and wipe it, without the need for a full PC setup, or any disk wiping tools? Possibly. I could see it being pretty useful for someone who would need to wipe drives on a semi regular basis, without the expense of having a spare machine just for that purpose, especially a small business that is replacing drives as they go bad, or something similar? What do you think, would you recommend it to anyone you know?
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I generally see it this way, if Im giving away or selling a drive then Im probably savvy enough to run drive wiping software from a CD to zero it out. The biggest problem in that scenario is making sure you zero out the right drive(!!).
If Im just disposing of a drive, do I really need to go to the trouble of zeroing it out? Smashing the holy living hell out of it is not only more satisfying, but in the end run probably just as secure. The thief's who steal identities arent going to go to the trouble to replace busted circuit boards, read platters, etc. to take data off a smashed drive. Bonus points, anyone can smash a drive against the curb five or ten times
I agree, more often than not those of us in the tech field already know how to wipe a drive using other tools, that don't really cost money, but I still wonder if there's a market out there for people who either don't really have the know-how, or don't want to risk wiping the wrong drive by connecting it up to a machine with a different drive connected already. Since this works without the CPU, you plug the drive itself into the device, you'd eliminate that risk, aside from physically hooking up the wrong drive, which you can never fully eliminate.
Yes, if you're disposing of a drive nothing beats the effectiveness, and stress relieve of physically destroying it! 🙂