Chicago (IL) - Ultra-X, known for its professional hardware and software diagnostic tools, has introduced a simple, OS-independent tool to safely erase data from IDE harddrives.

A utility such as QuickTech Hard Drive Cleaner (HDC) comes in handy in numerous cases and not just when harddrives need to be prepared for a fresh software installation. Also when computers or harddrives are given into different hands, it is wise to make sure that there no critical data left on a drive, since even deleted data can be restored with recovery software.

The HDC boots directly from a floppy-disc at system start a offers four different levels for erasing data. A quick clean will write "00" over the boot sector and will continue to write "00" on the first Byte of each sector, a process which makes sense to reload an operating system and put back the drive back into use. One step further, the software writes a single FF-pattern over the full span of the drive.

As a third level, HDC offers a random erase function. As with the preceding function, it will begin by erasing the boot sector. Once the boot sector is erased, it will erase data in random patterns. Clusters of data are deleted from random sectors on the drive.

Option four is a full erase which writes the drives three times with three different patterns. The first pattern will write "00", the second pattern will write "AA" and the third pattern will write "FF" over the full span of the drive and meets governments ecurity requirements, according to Ultra-X.

HDC supports up to eight IDE harddrives and is available for $39.

Source : Tom's Hardware US