Data Wiping

Secure data wiping usually involves writing zeros or random characters to a storage device so that any stored data becomes overwritten and is unrecoverable. There are several free and commercial applications on the internet that claim to perform this task securely. However, with the proliferation of solid state disks, traditional “wiping software” or “disk erasure” software might not always work as effectively on SSDs, compared to mechanical disks. This is because SSDs do not store their data in the same fashion as mechanical disks and are often only capable of being securely erased by commands issued from the controller on the storage device itself. See also Data Remanence