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

[Don Cady]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Tim Champion <timchampion at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

While I commiserate on some level (I'd love to buy used drives for
pennies and assemble a SAN of ZFS pools*, all running on solar & wind
-that's the fantastical part of my brain talking.. :p ), this is their
data. To some, once proprietary data has lived on those drives, the
drives are tainted. It's not actually "no chance", it's near-zero
chance, sure, but not actually zero.
Yes, they are THAT worried. This goes back to
>> the resourcefulness of the folks wanting to recover the data.
If you have a trade secret you could milk for 5-10yrs and your
competitor has the _possibility_ of recovering it in 4yrs time, would
you be paranoid enough to destroy the HD? Many are.
The majority, however, are simply concerned with liability when it
comes to financial account information, privacy-related data, health
history, etc. When reducing risk, the option that reduces it closest
to zero for minimal cost is the one most chosen. Short of a blow torch
(back to liability again), that option is shredding-metal destruction.

> 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 am glad to hear of a governemt contractor doing "the right thing".
We hear so many stories of our private data being 'lost'.

Don

* For those who have a Sun storage environment where their technicians
come out to replace degraded HDs once a year, how do you know those
are going out the door "secure" ? Do you stop them before they get out
the door to drill holes in the old drives?