How to securely erase your hard drive or SSD

The siren has sung and you’ve finally succumbed to her call: You’re the proud owner of a shiny new PC, a faster SSD, or a bigger hard drive. It’s time to sell or donate your old gear and start playing with your new toys, right? Not so fast. First you need to securely erase the data off your old hard drives so you don’t become a victim of identify theft.

Simply deleting the data off your hard drive doesn’t erase it as you might expect. Instead, NTFS (the file system used by Windows PCs) just hides the data from immediate view, leaving it to be overwritten when a new file takes up residence on the drive. That’s a workable scenario for everyday use, but it could spell disaster when it’s time to part with an old machine.

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from PCWorld https://ift.tt/3giac5o