I have a couple of hard drives that I would like to sell on Ebay. However, I have information on them that I wouldn't like other people getting a hold of. I know that I could erase the information on the hard drive using OSX's Disk Utility application. My question is this: I was wondering if this is the best way of doing this. Is there any other method that would help get rid of all the information on the hard drives? Maybe some third party software? thanks in advance.

Disk Utility will work and erase by over writing with ones and zeros and do many passes to make it safest.
Keep in mind if you want to protect the CIA from getting data back, you will have to destroy the drive so there is erasing and then there is erasing.

I would be surprised how much you will get for used drives though unless these are quite large. I can buy a new 500 gig drive now for under $100 so assuming this is not your scenario might I suggest you get price references online to see if it is even worth your time and shipping for the final gain and continued risk of data being restored by someone. Maybe those who would even buy your used drives indend to see what information they can get AND are setup to do this with advance knowledge?

-Peter

There are third party and free ware programs to erase drives that have a feature called "security wipe". This is supposed to overwrite all data and catalogs and registers to the point that only the most intense drive reconstruction by the CIA will bring back your drive's information. I use a such free program called BURN, but have never attempted to recover outdated data I have "Burned".
C.J. Scheiner

These programs do exactly what I described with Disk Utility. They write ones and zeros. Nothing magical.

-Peter

And "x" and "@" and various symbols in random order or even a pattern you compose yourself (in Disk Doctor). As Peter said, nothing magical.
I have been told by various people that either seven or thirteen over writes is good enough for most governemnt work. I have also been told that sequentially using different erasing programs in "security mode" is even better.
Cliff
C.J. Scheiner