Best external HD cleaner software?

[apc]

I need to really clean some HDs - like govt clean. Any suggested software?

[Jstas]

If you need government level of clean, the government has utilities available to achieve that. But then again, the government considers "cleaning" to be a through degaussing.

If you need software, Google is your friend.

[edbert]

http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

I have used this before. Seems to work well. I have another one installed on my computer at home but I forget what it was. I think the hard drive cleaner portion was part of another program. I'll let you know when I get home this evening.

[BigMac]

This one is free and works very well. I had a friend try to recover data that I deleted with this using hardware recovery which is much more in depth than software recovery. Needless to say he did not recover anything. I still use it today. You have the option to overwrite files,delete whole drives,do a secure move and so on. You can choose the level of removal as well; starting at 1x overwrite to the 35x Gutmann method. If you go this route d/l the Eraser 5.8.6a version, not the beta version as it has not been tested to see if 'everything' is erased.

http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

http://666kb.com/i/b9nnj29yuebc8jwva.bmp

[polktiger]

wild thought, can you use an electromagnet like you used to use on casette tapes and floppy disks

[ninerbj]

Am I missing something? Why would you want to do this?

[edbert]

It deletes any traces of your old information (and possibly sensitive info like bank accounts, ssn, etc.) if you are planning on sellling a hard drive or old computer with the hard drive. Other than that, I don't know of any real reason.