sanitizing disc

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2014-02-02 at 14:06 -0500, Nathan Dorfman wrote:
> The above is very bad advice.

The advice about using "shred" was good.

> If you have a relatively modern SATA drive, there is a SATA command to
> tell the drive to securely erase itself.

These commands apply only to quite modern drives. Also, use of these
commands is for advanced users only. A mistake can brick the drive,
making it completely unusable, with no option but to discard the drive.
Worse - the drive may be bricked without first destroying the data.
Direct use of drive-level commands is a good, fast solution for the
professional or commercial operator, but is not a wise choice for the
amateur or home user that needs to wipe the occasional disk..

If your requirement is to destroy data without any hope of recovery,
even by a skilled operator with plenty of resources, then you should not
try to save money by deleting data from a hundred-dollar drive. You
should destroy the drive, as I said in my first post on this subject.
There are companies that will literally shred the drive for you -
physically grind it to dust. A lower-tech and much cheaper method is to
put the drive on a concrete block, put on safety glasses, and hit the
drive four or five times with a sledge-hammer.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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