Video: Wiping Off Your Computer Hard Drive

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI)-Electronics have been hot ticket items for shoppers this holiday season, especially laptops and computers.

Usually, once customers purchase new computers, they tend to trade in or sell their old ones.

However, they’ll often times forget to wipe off their computer, leaving all of their data and information on there for hackers and everyone else to get a hold of.

“Yeah it is a common thing people can find old hard drives,” said Sheldon Burns, employee at Starkville Computers. “You can go find old computers at pawn shops and stuff like that, and plug up the hard drive and find all kinds of pictures and some might save some passwords.”

That’s why experts like Burns believe its crucial to wipe off your computer before recycling it.

“There are some things that build in already to,” Burns explained. “A lot of the newer computers, for instance, Windows 8 and Windows 10 there, is a reset this PC function that goes through and gives you options to wipe the data, and it goes through and cleaned all the data off and writes a little bit of data over so that it’s hard to recover.
Other things they can do is use a restore disk that came with the computer to put it back to the factory state.”

Burns said users can wipe off the hard drives themselves, but to ensure that everything is completely cleaned, he said its best to just leave things up to the professionals.

“What we prefer to do and we do this with all the old hard drive they come with anyone’s machine they recycle will take it outback have someone hit it with a hammer a few times and breaks everything inside of it and then he goes and gets melted down,” he said.

Burns said it takes anywhere from an hour to two hours to completely wipe a computer’s hard drive.