hard drive eraser software

I have bought many a hard-drive from eBay for my own computers and those of friends/family that I have repaired. Buying hard-drives in this manner is all very well and can save you a lot of money, however, previously used hard-drives need to be treated with caution. There are a couple of essential steps that should always be carried out if you are planning to re-use a drive from someone else's computer:

At the very least use a decent anti-virus and anti-malware software to scan for unwanted files, but ideally, get yourself some decent hard drive eraser software and wipe the drive clean of anything that was previously there. Now I don't really want to get into details, but suffice to say that if the previous owner of the hard-drive downloaded anything that they shouldn't have, simply reformatting the drive DOES NOT erase all trace of the previous files - it simply assigns the space as 'available' - A thorough search of the data remaining on the drive AFTER formatting will uncover most of the previous owners files. Hard drive eraser software will overwrite the previous data, and therefore actually delete it from the hard-drive.