To make sure a computer hard drive is wiped properly, it depends whether the drive is an old-fashioned spinning-disk drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). of Hertfordshire carried out a very similar study of USB flash drives earlier this year.) How to properly wipe your hard drive and the U.K.Ī plurality of Brits (37%) tried quick-formatting the drives, and the greatest number of Yanks (24%) tried just deleting files, but only slightly Britons (29%) than Americans (23%) succeeded in properly wiping the drives. The researchers bought 200 used hard drives online, in secondhand shops and in "conventional auctions," Comparitech said, splitting the numbers evenly between the U.S. Data-recovery tools will still be able to get most of the files back.Īnother 16% of the previous owners held no illusions about data safety and had made no attempt whatsoever to wipe the drives, Comparitech reported. Twenty-six percent of the drives had been subject to a quick-format process, but that doesn't zap much more the deletion process. The file is still there and can easily be read by drive-recovery tools. But as computer experts can tell you, deleting a file only tells the computer's operating system that the data can be overwritten. Seventeen percent of the drives had had the data "deleted" by their previous owners.
The sad part was that 43% of the previous owners had tried to wipe the drives.
0 kommentar(er)
