[Cialug] Semi-OT: wiping a hard drive once is enough?

[Tim Champion]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Morris Dovey <mrdovey at iedu.com> wrote:

> Nathan Stien wrote:
>
>  In the above link, the author says that multi-pass hard drive wiping
>> programs are silly, because overwriting data once with zeroes is enough to
>> make it unrecoverable to forensics experts.  This is definitely counter to
>> what I have been taught, and I'm curious what y'all think about it.
>>
>
> Methinks it depends on {1} how the drive was used and (2) on the
> resourcefulness of the folks wanting to recover the data.
>
> If the data areas were changed frequently, then there may be less risk; and
> if the data areas were changed only infrequently and read back with very
> much more sensitive amplifiers, it might be possible to recover a much
> larger portion of the content.
>
> --
> Morris Dovey
> DeSoto Solar
> DeSoto, Iowa USA
> http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/
>
>
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Whenever I hear of people drilling holes through functioning hard drives, it
makes me sad and angry.  Its a perfectly good drive!  Why are you destroying
it??  If you are THAT worried about your data, do a 3 pass wipe with DBAN,
and then you have a good hard drive with no chance of getting the data off.


If I remember right, a 3 pass DBAN wipe is
1. all 0's
2. random bits called "Mersenne twister"
3. all 0's again.

I think that is a Department of Defense complaint way to wipe your hard
drive.  I worked for an organization that stored DOD medical records, and
that's what we did with the drives before returning the leased machines to
our leasing company (or selling them to employee's or whatnot).

I know people say they don't have time to do that, time is money, blah,
blah.  First off, it takes very little time to boot up DBAN and start a
wipe.  You don't have to babysit it.   Second, I think those people just
want to drill holes in stuff and grunt like Tim the Tool Man Taylor more
than they care how much time they are spending wiping a drive.
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