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In general, you can't really scrub a hard drive. No company in their right mind should ever let an old computer go out the door with a hard drive in it. Hard dr
by lr 16y ago
In general, you can't really scrub a hard drive. No company in their right mind should ever let an old computer go out the door with a hard drive in it. Hard drives should be destroyed. I recommend something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
- shizcakes 16y agoNot true. A single pass of 0's is sufficient to make a magnetic drive unrecoverable. Anything more is FUD.
- masomenos 16y agohave any references for this? I've seen the same claim and would love to believe it.
- pyre 16y agoThe whole '26 pass' thing is based on a paper that created 26 different patterns of wiping the drive in order to default the different hardware schemes for the hard drives of the day. But that paper was written long, long ago, and I don't believe any of those schemes are used anymore.
- pyre 16y agoOops. s/default/'defeat'/
- ErrantX 16y agoYeh agreed. It's a much argued situation in the Forensic world - but this paper pretty much agrees that it is impossible: http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/
- lr 16y agoGiven that our government requires the destruction of storage devices to protect their secretes from seeing the light of day, I have to wonder why anyone would ever want to risk it: http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/media_destruction_guidance/index.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/media_destruction_guidance/in... Seriously, how expensive are hard drives these days?!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ErrantX 16y agoYeh it' sensible if you have, say, confidential/classified information (we have to destroy most of our dead drives). But I think that's mostly just overkill. I'm fairly sure that it is completely infeasible to recover data even for the mighty government. :P I suspect the theory is that wiping a drive is prone to accidental failure/mistakes. Destruction is pretty unequivocally permanent :)
- jacquesm 16y agoWipe the drive, then destroy it. After all, simply destroying a drive would allow you to magnetically scan the bits and pieces of the platters left over.
- ErrantX 16y agomeh, I don't imagine anyone could do that - the positioning of the platters is important and with a load of it munched you're screwed :)
- jacquesm 16y agoHm... two steppers geared down quite a bit, a hard drive head. Striping between platters really is a problem, but given enough time... That would be an interesting challenge, now to find someone to pay for it. I don't think it would be easy, but if the information is still on the platters you should be able to recover at least some of it. Especially if it is email or other textual information it would not take a very large fragment to contain a large chunk of text. On a single platter drive you'd have a better chance than on a multi-platter one, the synchronization tracks would help in figuring out what went were. It's a bit like puzzling together shredded documents.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoWell, that depends on how paranoid you are... while overwriting a sector probably renders the data on that sector unrecoverable, modern disk may 'disable' bad sectors, copying their contents to more reliable sectors. Few people would care to try to recover these things, but if you really are working with nuclear secrets...