Thinking of upgrading your hard drive? Well, one can never have enough space. Even this weekend, I am thinking of upgrading my RAID 0 array, maybe with several 200GB hard drives, pushing to the Terabyte level. Nice idea, just remember to wipe your old drives properly before you give them to someone else - they could yield many a secret.
According to forensics firm Disklabs, letters, resumes, spreadsheets, phone numbers and e-mail addresses were all found on storage hardware that could be bought second hand on eBay.
In its test of how good users were at destroying data, Disklabs bought 100 hard drives and 50 memory cards - which included SD cards, flash drives, sim cards and memory sticks - from the auction site.
"Most people made only cursory attempts to erase the data," said Mr Steggles, "and some had not done even that."
If you are going to sell a storage device that you previously held important and personal data on, then for Heaven sake try to erase it properly. In these days of identify theft and the like, you can't be too careful.