The Security Mentor

There's a full computer built into drives these days, and a standard set of useful commands that almost nobody takes advantage of. One of those is a command to do a secure erase, one which doesn't leave embarrassing data behind the way a simple deletion or reformat would.

Computerworld points out a free utility program that takes advantage of a disk drive's ability to erase itself. The program, logically enough, is called Secure Erase. It's a little awkward, unfortunately, requiring a DOS boot floppy.