Found myself with a pile of old hard drives that I collected from years of scavaging so I thought it would be nice to erase them properly before I ebay them. At the moment I tried using Active Eraser but is there other alternatives?
Try WipeDisk: http://www.gaijin.at/dlwipedisk.php (Don't get put off by the German, it's got English too) You can choose the level of deletion in the application.
I use the Free Space Washing option in Window Washer. All this crap about having to do multiple passes so that the data cannot be recovered is a load of crap, there is no program that can recover data after only one pass. Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional is about the best recovery software you can get, and even that is unable to recover a single file after only one pass.
There's plenty of software that might be able to read data after a single pass. Not always though. Past that, there's hardware approaches. Even those stop working after 7 passes according to the US government.
One pass (0s) generaly isn't enough if you really want to get to the data you can. Use whatever tool you have and let it do random writes for at least one pass, that should be enough but if you wanna be safe do some more.
