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Ezra ShiramFlag for United States of America

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Best/Cheapest Way to Erase Hard Drives

I have about ten hard drives that I need to wipe and they are in about five servers. I don't want to power on all of the servers and use software because that will take days. I heard that you can use electric magnets to erase all of the data but i'm worried  that it will cost too much. What's the fastest and cheapest way of doing this?

Thanks!!! :)
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TCB1
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Will these hard drives still be used? Or are you disposing of them and need to wipe them for security reasons?
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They are still going to be used. They are being sold to a liquidator.
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gzarnick

I would use XP Disk Manager if you could:

You can navigate to there from the control panel,
Performance and Maintenance, Admin Tools or
Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.


Or you can right-click on the Drive and press "Quick Format"
I use AEFDISK on a bootable CD which lets me delete all partitions from a fast booting comand prompt. AEFDISK.com
I would like to remove the data without powering on the servers.
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The term used for magnetically erasing a hard drive is "Degaussing"
Here is a service that provides degaussing for hard drives.  http://www.garner-products.com/Degserv.htm

I would use Dariks boot and nuke first before sending them anywhere,  especially if they have sensitive data on them, but that would take time.
 http://www.dban.org/
IMHO it would be cheaper and faster to buy new drives and take a sledge hammer to the old ones.
Without turning them on?? You'll at least have to remove them from the server if that's the case.
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... One caveat about DBAN => it does not work with external (USB) drives; so you'll need to attach the drives to an internal controller on the system you're using to do the wiping.    There are commercial products that will wipe USB drives if you'd prefer to simply attach the drives via a USB adapter => for example the $99.95 "Pro" version of WipeDrive will wipe up to 50 drives:  http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-erase-hard-drive.php?gclid=CM3ovdOrnZYCFRJuxwodBWeLoA