From the article: "Both Quick Erase and DoD Short should be more than enough to prevent people from snooping on your data — but if you want to be really certain

From the article: "Both Quick Erase and DoD Short should be more than enough to prevent people from snooping on your data — but if you want to be really certain that no one, including the feds, can read your data, use 8-pass PRNG Stream." On a modern drive, quick erase (a single pass writing random data) is good enough to keep anyone from reading your data. As Peter Gutmann says in the Further Epilogue to his famous paper [0]: "Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging." [0] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html