WipeDrive Product Review

By Milton Hooper
Law Office Computing Magazine
April/May 2005
As painful as it might be, at some point you will have to decide what to do with your old and outdated computer equipment. The part of your old computer that will cause you the most concern is the hard drive. What will you do with it? How will you dispose of it? You don't want to become a footnote on the news after someone accessed the information on your hard drive, which you thought had been deleted.

Wipe Hard Drive - Prevent Identity Theft

The threat of identity theft also should encourage you to effectively purge your old hard drive. Simply formatting your hard drive is not enough. Computer hackers are much too clever at finding ways to retrieve deleted information these days. The saying "deleted doesn't mean deleted" is true, but WipeDrive makes sure your information is truly gone.

Wipe Hard Drive - Department of Defense Approved

The company boldly states on its Web site that WipeDrive has wiped more that 20,000,000 drives. The software is also listed as an approved disk-sanitizing tool by the Department of Defense and by other U.S. government agencies. WipeDrive supports any size hard drive and permanently wipes out operating systems, program files, and all data including partition tables, and FAT 16, FAT 32, NT File System, and Linux drive formats.

Wipe Hard Drive - Easy to Use

While wiping your hard drive using WipeDrive is easy, you still must use extreme caution when you do this. The process is somewhat like walking through a minefield. You will want to have uninterrupted time and you should not race through it. Remember- you are erasing information you will not be able to recover. A quick-start card is included, but it needs a few more details.

Wipe Hard Drive - The Wiping Process

To begin, I inserted the WipeDrive CD to create a bootable diskette. The company states the WipeDrive CD-ROM is bootable and a diskette is optional. When the bootable diskette was created, I was prompted to restart my computer and boot from the diskette I just created. According to the company, prompting also can occur before creating the disk, but I didn't experience that. Once your computer starts, you will be faced with several options. You should read everything carefully to make sure you make the proper selections. The WipeDrive prompts will guide you through the process and generate report logs for your records.

Wipe Hard Drive - Wiping Options

I used WipeDrive to wipe a drive from a computer we used for child pornography cases. This was a hard drive we absolutely wanted to make sure had been sanitized before disposing of the equipment or donating it to a school or nonprofit organization. To make sure a thorough overwrite was done, I selected the WipeDrive option in accordance with DOD 5220.22-M (the DOD-approved option).

WipeDrive - The Verdict

Wipe Hard Drive - DOD Wipe and Verify The DOD option took approximately three hours to accomplish. I also selected the option to verify the drive had been wiped, which confirmed the process. I would have liked the option to print this verification. Once this was completed, my hard drive was completely erased. I even attempted to restore the hard drive with Norton Utilities but there was nothing left to restore. Wipe Hard Drive - MediaWiper Erases Removable Disks Also included with WipeDrive is MediaWiper, a useful tool for erasing hard drive partitions, diskettes, external hard drives, thumb drives, Zip disks, and other removable media. The only disk MediaWiper can't erase is your Microsoft Windows Operating System drive. This tool is particularly valuable if you don't need to wipe an entire drive, and only want to clean up diskettes or memory cards. You can operate this within Windows without the need to reboot your computer or create a bootable disk for this process. Wipe Hard Drive - Conclusion If you are concerned about protecting your data and ultimately your identity, WipeDrive is a smallprice to pay for peace of mind. You will be able to part with your old hard drives a lot easier and not become a story on the nightly news.