Why does deleted data stay on a HDD once written, waiting to be overwritten, as opposed to being removed when requesting deletion?

Question

Why does deleted data stay on a HDD once written, waiting to be overwritten, as opposed to being removed when requesting deletion?

In: 22

Answer 1

Data isn’t deleted when you delete it, it’s marked as a writable block, and remains in tact until the hard drive uses that block for new data, which on traditional HDDs is pretty random actually. This is why you should scrub drives before selling or disposal and the scrubbing software writes junk data over all the ’empty’ space.