Writing Zeros to the drive - Risks?

[angrybusdriver]

If I were to use a third party application to write 0's and 1's and then 0's over and over again (to ensure complete erasure), would there be a risk of me damaging the drive or not being able to fully use the drive afterwards?

I've never written 0's to a drive, just formatted it, but I'll be selling these drives shortly, and I want to make sure that I get all of the data off of there and unrecoverable.

So, two questions.

a) What should I use to completely erase the drives?
b) Is there risk of messing up the drive so that I can't format it or use it properly in the future?

They are WD600BB (Wester Digital, 60GB, 2mb Cache) drives.

[Ice Czar]

risks none

use the Western Digital Lifeguard Utility to zero the drive

alternately use
DBAN or Autoclave
(Autoclave is included on the Ultimate Boot CD)
all are freeware (google any and they will be the first return)

[angrybusdriver]

Great, thanks a lot!

Gonna finally whipe 'em out.

[Emret]

would I get any performance increase if I write zeros instead of formatting ?

[CMB]

Originally posted by Emret
would I get any performance increase if I write zeros instead of formatting ?
No...other than the fact you will have a nice fresh install. I have tried to test a regular windows format vs autoclave. I noticed no difference in performance. I still use autoclave for most formats though.

[Ice Czar]

some people have claimed that assorted weirdness has disappeared after a zeroing of the HDD, but its likely that during the process a few bad sectors where discovered (and then locked out at the next format)

as CMB said, nope not really

Defect Mapping and Spare Sectoring (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatDefect-c.html)

an undiscovered bad sector or two can harm performance (depending on what is corrupt) or it can not matter at all to the OS and just be as KingPariah777 said:
"I just like being able to see jenna jameson without huge pixelated neon green corruptions all over her".
:p :p :p