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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SI Ron (Crazy Music Man) who wrote (79199)	8/13/2012 8:02:13 AM
From: SI Ron (Crazy Music Man)	Respond to of 110631

One problem with sending a hard drive back for warranty. Is if they get lost in transit. Case in point. Earlier this year I had an Iomega HDD fail, the USB 3 would not work anymore, but the USB 2 would. Not wanting to take hours wiping the drive, I just formatted it and returned it to Iomega. They told me once they get the drive, they permanently destroy all data on the drive, I was okay with that. Well they did not get the drive. Had to fill in a claim and they sent me out a refurbished drive. The dive is lost, no one knows where it is. So where did that drive with all my information on it land up? Formatting a drive does NOT remove the information. It's still there. Just like when you format or erase your camera SD card, the photos are still there if you have recovery software. They are still in perfect condition, the OS and camera just can't see them anymore, but recovery software can retrieve them in seconds. Now with my new HDD problem, its full of confidential information, just like the one that was lost. I was able to get the drive working again, and used a HDD utility to secure delete all files on the drive, it took 20 hours to wipe. It is a 1 TB drive. So if you are returning a bad or dying HDD for warranty, my advice, make sure that data is wiped off the HDD in case it does not make it to the manufacture and falls into someone else's hands. If the drive is dead as a door nail, you should be fine, but if it still works and you can access data, wipe that drive.