3 Best Hard Drive Erase Software Review

When donating or selling used computers, data on the hard drive shall be wiped clean so that sensitive personal info won’t fall into the wrong hands, you may have known that simple deletion and formation won’t erase hard drive, and deleted files can be easily picked up any data recovery programs, so today, we’ll share 3 best hard drive erase software for you.

1. Dban

Dban is a well-known hard drive eraser years ago, it’s free and open source, although it’s stopped providing supports and updates, it’s still a good data cleaning tool when you want to erase everything on the hard drive, from a bootable media, like CD or USB, in a command-line way. It has DoD 5220.22-M wiping standards built in too.

Note: Please be careful when defining the target disk to erase in Dban, because there’s no way to go back once it starts to erase. So please backup all your essentials to external hard drive before you boot into Dban.

What I don’t like Dban is that this tool is command-line based and easy to make mistake, besides, it cannot erase single file or folder, you have to erase all the drive or even the entire disk, which may take much longer time than erasing individual files.

2. Eraser (Heidi)

Eraser is another free data wiping tool, it is able to erase files, folders, unused space, drives, and disks, also equipped with DoD wiping methods, and Yes, it’s a good program to wipe daily unwanted documents with the quick access in the right-click menu.

Although Eraser is graphically designed, it will still take you some time understand. I mean, when first open this software, I don’t want to do, I can’t find the functions listed in the main window only have to right-click and create a new task, then I had to do 2 more clicks to choose erase file or disk.

The other point I don’t like Eraser is that it Cannot erase C Drive, unlike Dban’s bootable function, Eraser can’t even create bootable media to erase C Drive, which means you can’t erase the system partition when you want to erase everything on the disk.

Note: Eraser won’t ask you to confirm after you add an item to erase, so it’s better to choice manually run instead of immediately.

3. ByebyeData Eraser

ByebyeData Eraser is new to this market; it was released in July 2017. Although it’s not as famous as the above mentioned two programs, it does impress us by its functionality. It is capable of erasing files, folders, free space (unused space, deleted space), drives and disks when I say drives and disks, I mean both C Drive and Boot Disk are included. It is able to create bootable media, so you can easily burn the ISO file to CD or USB.

And, what’s more, it has an erasure report after the erase process completed.
And, it’s WinPE based graphically designed, you also have to confirm the erasure after clicked the Erase Now button.

Besides, ByebyeData Eraser is supported and updated consistently; the company just confirmed to us that they will add another new powerful function to its product.

What I dislike ByebyeData Eraser is that there’s no custom option for us to create our own wiping algorithm, although we may not even use it, it’s better than none.

Summary

To sum up, about the 3 eraser software above, I’d like to say:
When erasing the entire disk including operating system, Dban, and ByebyeData Eraser are the best option; when erasing single file with the right-click menu, Erase (Heidi) shall be your choice; when you want to hire an all-in-one data wiping software, ByebyeData Eraser can be taken into consideration.

Well, I made a table to compare them for your reference:

Product	DBAN	Eraser (heidi)	ByebyeData Eraser	Note
Freeware	Yes	Yes	Free Edition is available	Yes is better
Erasure functions	Disks, partitions	Disks; partition; files folders; unused space	Disks partitions free space; files and folders;	The more the better
Erase algorithms	6	13	14	The more the better
Confirm before erase	Yes	No	Yes	Yes is better
Supported Now	No	Yes	Yes	Yes is better
Updated	No	2016	2017	Newer is better
Bootable media	Yes	No	Yes	Yes is better
Erase boot disk	Yes	Run error	Yes	Yes is better
C Drive	Yes	No	Yes	Yes is better
UI	Command-line	Graphic	Graphic	Graphic is better
Easy to Use	Not really	Sort of	Yes	Yes is better
Mis-operate	Yes	Yes	No	No is better
Erasure Report	No	No	Yes	Yes is better