The PC World story here details how most used and discarded hard drives out there still have confidential information on them that can be easily retrieved.

This isn’t good, of course. Whether from a corporate workstation or home personal computer, you absolutely never want to let an ‘unscrubbed‘ hard drive out in the world. Lots of data you don’t want the world to see on any hard drive.

So before you dispose of any hard drive, be sure it is “scrubbed”. It’s a lot more than a simple format.

I dealt with this issue of how to scrub and clean off a hard drive in our IT blog back in May. Go here to see that post. There is also some information on disposing of computer equipment (including old hard drives) with Goodwill.