HDDerase is a
freeware
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...
utility that securely
erases data on
hard drives
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magneti ...
using the Secure Erase unit command built into the firmware of
Parallel ATA
Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection ...
and
Serial ATA
SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...
drives manufactured after 2001. HDDerase was developed by the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...
. HDDerase is designed for command-line use only.
It differs from other file deletion programs such as
Darik's Boot and Nuke
Darik's Boot and Nuke, also known as DBAN , is a free and open-source project hosted on SourceForge. The program is designed to securely erase a hard disk until its data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by ...
which attempt to erase data using block writes which cannot access certain portions of the hard drive. The internal firmware Secure Erase command can access data that is no longer accessible through software, such as bad blocks.
Tutorial on Disk Drive Data Sanitization
Gordon Hughes, UCSD Center for Magnetic Recording Research, Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates
See also
*Data erasure
Data erasure (sometimes referred to as data clearing, data wiping, or data destruction) is a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media b ...
*Data remanence
Data remanence is the residual representation of digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to remove or erase the data. This residue may result from data being left intact by a nominal file deletion operation, by reformatting o ...
*Undeletion
Undeletion is a feature for restoring computer files which have been removed from a file system by file deletion. Deleted data can be recovered on many file systems, but not all file systems provide an undeletion feature. Recovering data witho ...
* Hiren's BootCD, which contains HDDerase 4.0, the last known (2008) release.
References
External links
Secure Erase
- research information and download link
{{Data Erasure
Data erasure software