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Data protection, backup and disaster recovery specialist Paragon Software Group announces the release of Disk Wiper 15 Professional for the secure data protection on hard drives and solid state drives (SSDs).
In addition to protecting sensitive personal information, Disk Wiper frees up space by clearing remnants of deleted files and directories.
On the security side, 10 different algorithms follow safety standards to make sensitive data or specific data fragments unrecognizable by multiple overwriting, so they are impossible to retrieve by any means.
“The need to wipe or sanitize personal or company data is not a new issue, Konstantin Komarov,” CEO of Paragon, told eWeek. “Company or personal critical data should always be wiped before complete disposal or exchange of old storage devices. The new challenge is mostly related to the fact that due to dropping prices SSD storage devices are more and more in use nowadays, by both — companies and private users.”
The latest version of the platform supports the latest Windows 8.1 as well as all types of hard disk layouts, and Macs can be booted from the Linux-based wipe medium to securely erase all data from any selected HDD/SSD.
Because SSDs have a fundamentally different structure than traditional hard drives, data cleansing by multiple overwriting is not designed for SSDs, as any additional writing cycle contributes to the durability of the expensive SSD.
In addition, with traditional approaches it is not possible to delete a specific sector on an SSD because sequential and cyclic writing on SSDs allows for uniform use of the SSD cells.
However, the SSD-delete function in the Disk Wiper platform connects directly to the drive’s internal controller, and deletes data on an SSD without compromising the durability and functionality of the SSD.
“Since SSDs have a design that is essentially different from standard HDDs, the ordinary wiping operations will not work and they have the potential to compromise the condition of the SSD,” Komarov explained. “All major SSD manufacturers provide their customers with their own tools to wipe SSDs.”
He noted these tools only work with SSDs from a particular manufacturer, which means that if you are using several SSDs from different manufacturers you have to use different software tools to sanitize these different SSDs.
“Our tool works with SSDs from all major SSD manufacturers and therefore simplifies the process of SSD sanitization for everyone who uses SSDs from different manufacturers leaving all options open up to the user,” he said.
A built-in wipe media builder creates in three steps a bootable WinPE or Linux-based wiping environment on a USB flash drive or an ISO image.
With this wiping media, data can be deleted from hard drives even if the operating system fails to boot. The user can specify whether the wipe stamp feature should be added to the master boot record (MBR) of the deleted storage medium.
The wipe stamp contains information about the used wiping program, algorithm, wiping status, the serial number of the disk, the system ID (recalled through WMI).
If this storage medium is restarted, a notification appears of when and how the data volume has been deleted, though this option is available only if the total data volume has to be deleted.
Disk Wiper 15 Professional is available for $39.95, with a free 30-day demo version available from the company’s website.