When you are selling your old laptop or giving it away to someone, then you should erase all the personal data from the hard drive. This ensures that the new user of the computer won’t be able to recover your deleted files and abuse them in any way. Imagine someone runs a data recovery software like Recuva and easily recovering your personal files such as your income tax documents, your pictures, your online purchase receipts and more. In order to avoid all this, you can use a tool like Lowvel to completely erase all the data from a hard drive.
Lowvel is a Windows application that can work on all types of storage devices. It has a very simple user interface that shows a list of all the storage drives detected on your system. If you want to erase data from a storage device, you must connect it first to your computer before running Lowvel. You have to select one of the storage drives from this list and then click on the Start button.
The process will start for erasing the data in an irrecoverable manner. It uses the very fast method of zeroing al the data – i.e., it overwrites all the data with zeroes. While the method is very fast, it can be detected by experts and they will know that you have wiped the hard drive. You can wait for the process to complete or you can click on the Stop button to end the process in the middle.
Lowvel does not have any options like the overwriting method used or how many times it overwrites data on the target hard drive. If you want more options when wiping out a hard drive then you may want to find other tools like KillDisk, DBAN, Eraser etc. But no options in Lowvel also make it simple and very easy to use.
You can download Lowvel from http://www.lowlevelformat.info/.