preview : Stellar Disk Wipe Software

Sunday, February 01, 2009

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When disposing an old hard drive or moving or upgrading a NAS or a workstation, it's always advisable to erase data on them, as it might contain critical information that might end up in wrong hands. With effective data recovery technologies around, it's not enough to just delete it from Windows, as data deleted in such manner can always be recovered later. This is where disk wiping tools come in handy. We recently received one such tool from Stellar.

Stellar Disk Wipe, runs directly from a bootable CD and cannot be installed on a machine. Also the software doesn't run without the hardware license key. Using the software is quite simple. Once the system has booted with Stellar Disk Wipe CD, it launches a wizard which guides you through the process of disk sanitization. It supports 12 disk wiping algorithms from basic Zeros (1 pass) to the US Air Force AFSSI 5020 algorithm.

When wiping a 120 GB disk, it took us 4 hours and 48 minutes. After it had finished wiping the disk, it even gave us the option to save the log on a removable drive. We attached the drive to another machine and tried to retrieve data using a data recovery software, but the software did not find any files on the drive.

Bottomline: A decent solution for people dealing with disposing critical data.

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