The Drive eRazer erases any trace of your data on your hard drive.

The Drive eRazer Standard is a little gadget that true geeks and IT folks (who are sometimes one and the same) will love. It takes hard drive mechanisms and erases all the data, without using your Mac. If your forte is computer repair, or you do a lot of upgrades and such, the Drive eErazer will pay for itself immediately in time saved.

To erase a drive, you plug in the Drive eRazer, connect the hard drive, turn the eRazer on, and wait. LEDs tell you the status of the erasure, and how long it takes depends on the size of the drive. It took 50 minutes to erase a 80GB Western Digital Performer hard drive. It’s so easy, you’ll forget that you’re erasing a drive—and it’s nice to not tie up your Mac on such a task.

When Drive eRazer’s done, you’re left with a dataless drive that needs to be initialized and formatted before you can use it. We used Apple’s Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities) to reformat our erased drives, which we connected to our iMac using WiebeTech’s USB DriveDock v4 ($49.95). The erasing and formatting went flawlessly on the hard drives we tested with the Drive eRazer.

If you plan to resell the drive, you can rest assured that the eRazer has wiped out your data. The Standard edition of the eRazer performs a single-data pass of zeros on your drive. You can delete partitions, as well as host-protected areas—it’s possible that you could end up with more hard drive space after a host-protected area is deleted. WiebeTech has a Drive eRazer Pro that does multiple-data passes for $149.95.

We have one minor quibble, and it’s not really the Drive eRazer’s fault. Some hard drive mechanisms—especially older ones—make a lot of noise when you use them out of their case or the Mac that hosts them. The sound is more like white noise, the disks spinning, the head writing data. It’s nothing that’ll have your neighbors calling the cops—there’s a good chance others in the room won’t even notice. But if you’re erasing drive after drive after drive, it can slowly get on your nerves.

If you have Serial ATA drives, you need to get an adapter. WiebeTech sells a Drive eRazer bundle ($199.95) that includes the Pro version and SATA adapters.

The bottom line. The Drive eRazer has found a home in our testing lab. If you handle hard drives frequently, you’ll want one too

COMPANY: WiebeTech

CONTACT: www.wiebetech.com
PRICE: $99.95

REQUIREMENTS: 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch IDE/Parallel ATA hard drives (drives with other connectors require an adapter)
Quick and easy to use. Frees you and your Mac to do more important things.

Separate adapters required for Serial ATA hard drives and other non-IDE connectors.