A hard disk drive also known as a hard drive or hard disk is a non-volatile storage device, which has the facility to stock up digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters and magnetic surfaces. Its design consists of a spindle which can hold one or more flat circular disks known as platters, onto which the data recorded. It has the ability to store data more than floppy disk drive have further and transmit data at faster pace. Today, the boost in disk space and access speeds of hard disk drive have further facilitated the marketable viability of clients products that need great storage capacities, like digital audio players and video recorders.

However, the main problem that we are coming across is erasing data or files from hard disk permanently. Most of us think erasing files and emptying the recycle bin will help permanently get rid of those files. In fact, in most of the cases recycle bin tells that emptying the recycle bin will permanently remove items. But this statement is totally incorrect. You have to understand even after emptying the Recycle bin, the files can easily be recovered by data recovery programs. Making the best use of delete key on actually removes the shortcuts to the files and makes them undetectable to users. Deleted files still reside on the hard drive and a rapid Google search will automatically show options for systems recovery software will further allow to restore that data.

Apart from erasing the files or data from hard drive, many people also consider that the effective way to erase hard drive data is by formatting the hard drive. Though formatting the hard drive is somewhat secure than just erasing the files, but you should note that formatting a disk does erase only the address table. It makes it much more difficult to recover the files. However a computer specialist would be able to recover most or all the data that was on the disk before the reformat.

Disk Wiping is the next new technique that is gaining its popularity these days. Disk wiping is a new secure method and ensure that data, including individually licensed software on your computer and storage devices is irrecoverably deleted before recycling. Disk wiping is better method in comparison to erasing files or formatting the hard drive, becuase this method basically overwrites your entire hard with data, several times and once you formate your hard drive, you may find it impossible to get back the dats which was present on the drive before the overwrite.

Though disk wiping algorithms vary from product to product, they usaully write the entire disk with a number (zero or one) and then a reformat is requiered. Today, there are many products available in the market that you can purchase to handle this task. You can can hard drive erasers from ten all the way up to hundreads of dollars.