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The Great Zero Challenge Remains Unaccepted
- aaronchall 10y agoThese people are asserting that 7 passes with random data is not necessary to irrecoverably wipe a drive. At first glance, they seem to be making a credible point. However, they say: > You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive. I would think that those who are making 7 passes are assuming that an interested actor would be willing to disassemble the drive to recover the information. Also, their incentives are rather weak: > Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery". I would like to find an authoritative source that users interested in irrecoverably wiping their data could use, but this seems to not be it.
- dalke 10y agoWhat would count as 'authoritative'? When this came up last, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370895 , I found papers like http://all.net/ForensicsPapers/2012-12-07-OverwrittenMagneticRecovery.pdf http://all.net/ForensicsPapers/2012-12-07-OverwrittenMagneti... > To date I have found no example of any instance in which digital data recorded on a hard disk drive and subsequently overwritten was recovered from such a drive since 1985, when about 15% of the overwritten data was claimed to have been recovered from an modified frequency modulation (MFM) disk drive. This in turn cites "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy" - http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data... . There is even more at http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-possible-to-recover-data-on-a-zeroed-hard-drive http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-poss... .
- aaronchall 10y agoThanks!