Quote Originally Posted by Escrap View Post
Is it necessary to check a hard drive to resell it. I don't think people give you their stuff, thinking you are going to be searching through their information and pictures. Cant you just test the hard drive for functionality(using a hard drive health tool) and then over write it if it comes back OK, instead of plugging it in and searching through it.

Zack
Generally, if you want to make sure you have really overwritten every bit of storage on an HDD so that data is not recoverable, you have to wipe it several times in a special way. Here's one tool that supposedly does that:

http://eraser.heidi.ie/

I was told that the reason simply formatting a drive once would not work and you still might be able to recover the old data is that magnetic media has some type of "memory". I don't understand the physics of it so I am just parroting what I was told.