4 ms·
Ask HN: Best way to wipe a disk?
What is the best way to wipe a disk:
1) write all 1's
2) write all 0's
3) write alternating 1's & 0's or other pattern
4) write random patters
5) write fake data, that is mark sectors as deleted but then fill them with words, perhaps random text from news articles off the web for example.
- nabla9 13y agoIt does not matter. "Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack." http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_with-errata.pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-... If somebody knows disc recovery firm that claims the ability to rescue data from modern hdd after dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M let me know. Don't forget secure erase command. It clears even hidden data areas: hdparm --security-erase Eins /dev/sda
- 2close4comfort 13y agoFIRE! or Over-writing about 7 times but I usually go for the first one unless it is trivial data.
- anthony_franco 13y agoIf you have a HDD (and maybe with SSD, not sure), the drive won't read/write to any bad sectors you might have. If that's the case, then a software solution won't completely wipe your drive. You'd most likely have to take the drive apart and apply a strong magnet on each of the platters. Or, as previously suggested, "FIRE!".
- wikwocket 13y agoDBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) is my favorite solution. You can put it on a bootable CD, bypass your OS, and just wipe the disks easily. Here is a link to a bunch of other solutions as well: http://superuser.com/questions/4678/securely-erasing-all-data-from-a-hard-drive http://superuser.com/questions/4678/securely-erasing-all-dat...
- junto 13y agoIf you are paranoid - Thermite