Everybody who owns a computer will someday need to dispose of a disk drive. Before you do, it is a good idea to cleanse the drive, so no one can read your sensitive information. Deleting files and reformatting is not sufficient; determined effort can still reveal data from a drive even after it appears to be gone. To do a more thorough job, I suggest using wipe.

Hard drive encryption (and to a lesser extent, secure hard drive erasing) has been in the news regarding child pornography crossing the US border, government officials around the world erasing incriminating emails and other nefarious headlines.