The Ultimate Protection for Hard Drive Data

Is the only way to protect old hard drives the smash and destroy method? That is what one computer publication is advocating:

“The only way to stop fraudsters stealing information from old computer hard drives is by destroying them completely, a study has found.

Computing magazine Which? recovered 22,000 “deleted” files from eight computers purchased on eBay.”

link: Hard drive destruction ‘crucial’

There are many security programs online which ‘overwrite’ the data drive so many times that the claim is that the files are un-retrievable. The smash and destroy method is certainly a conclusive method. It just seems such a waste of useful hardware. Has this now become the preferred security precaution with old hard drives?

Catherine Forsythe