Hard drive erasure software for SSDs and HDDs are plentiful on the market, however most are unable to completely remove data from a disk. The reason for this is traditional hard drive erasure via software is simply writing a new layer to a disk to hide the one underneath it. While this is very practical giving the user the ability to start with a ‘fresh’ install, the old data remains on the disk, and can be extracted later should it fall into the wrong hards.
Therefore, securely cleaning hard drives requires the software to work in tandem with a degaussing machine where the erasure can not only be verified in real time, but the data can no longer be retrieved afterwards. The Data Destruction Auditor by Verity Systems is a step up from the traditional erasure software in that it enables the automatic erasure of hard drive + its total destruction.
Software can be connected to data degaussers such as the SDD Master hard drive degausser or the Crunch 250 Hard Drive Destroyer from Verity Systems. However it’s important to note that a hard drive must first be degaussed to ensure 100% data wiping takes place, then it can be crushed or destroyed for the purposes of recycling.
