I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?
They are running windows vista and 10 I think.
Data on a HDD that’s been overwritten with zeros or random data is unrecoverable with all known current technology.
In theory it might be possible to recover something with some future tech that hasn’t been invented yet, which is why the DOD standard requires erasing with multiple passes, but there isn’t currently a (publicly known) way of doing it.
SSDs are a bit tricky because of wear levelling, but usually two full overwrites of a SSD makes it just as unrecoverable.