A client has asked a technician about drive sanitation and wants to know what the difference
is between overwriting a drive and formatting a drive. Which of the following would be the
BEST response from the technician?

A.
“Overwriting writes 1s and 0s to a hard drive replacing the data, while formatting only
clears the reference to the data and only overwrites as space is used.”

B.
“Nothing is different. They both destroy the data so no one can recover it.”

C.
“Overwriting writes 1s and 0s to the drive replacing only the user’s data but not the OS
data, while formatting destroys the hard drive.”

D.
“Overwriting replaces all the data with a single file that fills the hard drive destroying the
data, while formatting erases all the data.”

Explanation:

Reference:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/261702/how_to_securely_erase_your_hard_drive.html