If you're giving it to the CIA, FBI, Interpol, DEA, DOD, or NSA, you would want to have the drive professionally erased.  If none of the above, and the drive is not going to a business competitor or any of the above, you will probably be safe with a reformat.  If you are paranoid, go to www.WD.com, which is Western Digital's web site.  There you can download their free DOS program that will write zeroes to everything on the drive.  You can also download a freebie from www.pcmag.com/utilities called Shred. It can shred files to Dept of Defense standards.

>I want to give away one of my computers but it has some sensitive data on it.  To make sure it cannot be recovered, is it enough to format the hard drives or do I need to use some sort of disk eraser program?
>
>Marilyn
>
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