Hard Drive Eraser

When deleting a file or formatting a drive, the operating system just marks the corresponding sector, on the hard drive, as free, instead of erasing the physical data. This is why deleted data can be recovered. If you want to get rid of your files permanently, Hard Drive Eraser will help you. Instead of deleting data the traditional way, it uses various algorithms to overwrite the physical information, multiple times, with useless binary data.

Hard Drive Eraser is freeware and it works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. You can start using this application right away, without going through an installation process. You just need to download a file, which is roughly 600 KB, and run it.

The application can scrub local partitions and removable memory devices. You just need to select a drive, on a compact interface, and choose a shredding method. Hard Drive Eraser can format your selected drive by writing zeros or it can use other schemes, like Peter Guttman, US Army or DoD.

Additionally, you can choose a file system, like NTFS, FAT or FAT32 and tick an option for a quick format. Security is another feature of Hard Drive Eraser. You can never be too careful when formatting a drive, especially if the information is lost forever. This is why the application will display a clear warning and it will ask you to type the word "ERASE", when you hit the Start button.