Clean up

When disposing of old laptops and computers, I have always removed the hard discs.

I am under a number of NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements), so disposing of a disc with confidential information on would not be good.

I have been going through some of these discs, making sure that I have all of the data and files that I need from them for my records and then doing a secure delete, which repeatedly writes data to every sector of the drive to make it impossible to recover. That's a very slow process - a 500GB drive can take a day. 

Once done I have what appears to be a brand new hard disc.