If you want to completely erase a hard drive, it is not as simple as erasing everything on it. To truly erase the data on the hard drive for good, you need to take a few extra steps.

A common way to "wipe" data is to format the hard drive, but you are not actually wiping the drive of its data when you do this, but instead only erasing the location information for the data, making it "lost" to the operating system. Since the operating system cannot see the data, the drive will appear blank when you look at its contents.

However, all the data is still there and unless you actually wipe the hard drive, it can be recovered with special software or hardware. Remember that wiping, deleting, erasing and shredding are technically different terms.

The most responsible thing you can do before recycling or even disposing of a hard drive is to completely erase it. If you don’t, you risk exposing sensitive personal data that you previously deleted, such as account numbers, passwords, etc.