wipe /dev/sda

[Florian Diesch]

Odd <iodine at runbox.no> wrote:

> Avi Greenbury wrote:
>> Accessys at smart.net wrote:
>>> according to security experts the ONLY sure way to clean a hard drive
>>> is with a sledge hammer......
>> 
>> I've had at least one company tell me that they can recover data from a 
>> drive so cleaned.
>> 
>> I've always gone with overwriting and reasonably secure disposal.
>> I don't save any data that's worth expending any time to recover, and 
>> anything that comes close is encrypted.
>> 
>> A while ago I had a brief look into this, and couldn't find any 
>> compelling explanation of why overwriting a drive several times with 
>> random data would not be sufficient, and several people explaining why 
>> it should be, especially with modern hard drives.
>> I'll see if I can dig out any of that data.
>
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

Note that this paper is 13 years old and the technology used by hard
discs has changed since that quite a bit.

   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>