On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Lee Winter <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Aaron Toponce <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 08:59:14AM +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: > >> If you want to be safe, you need to overwrite the data several times, > > > > Have anything to back that up? If you're using drives that used the old > MFM > > or RLL encoding schemes, and had massive space for bits per linear inch, > > then sure, but on today's drives, with perpindicular encoding, and the > > extremely dense bit capacity, going more than once is silly. > > I perform this service for commercial recyclers. Or in other words, it must be true because the service provided depends on this being true. It remains an urban legend as long as there is no proof offered otherwise. I'm not saying it is true or not, but just that there has never been a demonstration made public of getting data off drives after a complete zeroing. So it remains an unknown, and never demonstrated. Perhaps if you have military grade secrets to to protect you'll want any and all methods done to it. They will buy the whole protection package out of paranoia, the same way the U.S. has many times overestimated the capabilities of the USSR in the cold war. It doesn't make it real, it just makes it a solution to follow in the vein of "better safe than sorry". You don't want what seems like a solution today to be overrun by tomorrow's technology, so go for total destruction. Personally, my drives are so old when discarded they have no purpose in reuse, so I don't zero. I use physical destruction, and it takes only a minute. But out of paranoia, I can't say publicly how I do it.
