What Happens During A Hard Drive Wipe

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A hard drive wipe refers to a secure deletion procedure that leaves no traces of the data that used to be stored on the wiped hard drive. This is usually performed using specialized software programs designed for this purpose. It should be noted that a hard drive wipe is different from and much more secure than simply deleting all the files that are on a hard drive.

This is because when a file is deleted, it is not really entirely removed from the hard disk. What actually happens is that the file is simply marked as having been deleted, and the hard disk space that it occupies is marked as being ready for use. So the file is no longer listed in its directories. Also, the space in which a deleted file is contained may in fact be overwritten by new data being put into the hard disk.

For many applications and users, this file deletion may be sufficient. A more thorough deletion would just be a waste of system resources, and thus is usually not implemented. However, there are certain cases in which the more secure deletion that a hard drive wipe affords becomes desirable.

For instance, computers that handle critical information might eventually be reassigned,...

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