Free PC Cleaners
Want to give our grandson old laptop & would like to clean the hard drive & delete files,What would be the best way to go about it?Thanks
Forum Discussion
1492 wrote:
Is Guttman(35 pass?) any more effective than a single or three pass wipe with modern high density HDs? My understanding is that Guttman is "theory" based on 90's era technology involving early low density HDs that was never really proven. So for the most part, a waist of time.
The important point is to overwrite the drive space. There are academic papers that show 1-2 passes are all that is necessary to make file recovery virtually impossible for all practical purposes with modern HD.
As mentioned, SSD by design do not require to be over written with OS support for TRIM. In fact, doing so reduces their useful life.
With the way newer hard drives store data, the Guttman pass is more of a psychological assurance than a realistic need. I also use it as a way to make sure the HDD is able to read/write everything, so if there are SMART pre-fail errors triggered by the relocation table filling up, they will go off during the large writes as opposed to later on.
HDD makers are all about density, so if a drive could have bits remaining after a few wipes, HDD makers would be trying to figure out how to use the same sector to store multiple bits for more space.
