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by Vincent Foley.
Original Post: Disk wiping utilities?
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This question is addressed to the techies who mistakenly read my blog: what disk wiping utilies do you use? I'm gonna be wiping a lot of hard disks in the next few days, so I'm considering my options. The number one quality is a very clean wiping; there may be sensitive data on these disks, but since we plan to donate them to public schools, we don't want some pimply teenager with a lot of time and technical knowledge browsing around.
Other qualities I am looking for are that the utility can wipe multiple disks at the same time, that the process of starting new disks be relatively simple (as few keystrokes as possible). Free tools are nice to have to. So far, I've got these choices:
GDisk: That's not Google Disk, it's a utility that comes with Symantec Ghost. It seems to do the job, however I don't know whether you can wipe multiple drives simultaneously. It has the advantage that you just pop in the floppy, boot the computer and come back a few hours later.
dban: I haven't tried it yet, but my friend Joel has recommended it to me. I don't know if starting the process is complicated and long, or it just starts automatically. The website claims that dban will wipe any hard disk it detects, so I'm guessing that it can work simultaneously.
Disk Wipe: This is a utility that comes with ERP Commander, some sort of Windows XP Live CD to recover data. It works well, seems pretty fast, I know you can do more than one wipe at a time, however the process is rather long: Start Menu, System Utilities, Disk Wipe, select "Wipe Disk", select the disk, type the disk's label to confirm and then it starts.
DSX: I've used that when I worked for the federal government, however I learned that its usage is restricted to governemental agencies only, so I guess this one's out. Anyway, I remember it was long to setup and did one disk at a time.
If you know of other utilites, please let me know.
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