Suggest tool for erasing HDs via USB

[MobileTechie]

I have some drives I'd like to wipe clean but I'd prefer to do it over USB, ideally with a Windows app. I'm struggling to find one that does this. The ones I'm used to are boot disks and won't detect my USB drives anyway.

 

[iisjman07]

I'm fairly sure you could do this with Eraser from portableapps

 

[MobileTechie]

I was thinking of that and I also just downloaded this: http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm which says it does it.

However I remember listening to Scott Moulton's podcast and him saying that merely erasing data doesn't actually erase the whole drive. The problem is that erasing only erases live sectors and so sectors that have been reallocated are missed - because the OS doesn't know anything about them. The only way to erase these is to use ATA commands. But I get the impression that this might not be possible from Windows, might only be possible when the drive is connected to the ATA system directly, and maybe also not possible on SATA.

In practice how important this is, is another matter. I'm guessing that since the sectors were reallocated any residual data might be damaged, and that unless lots of sectors representing contiguous data were reallocated, the data an adversary would recover is likely to be meaninglessly.

He also said that just using straight 0's deletion is enough and that here is no real reason to start going down multiple random deletions with modern drives, which is good news speed-wise.