On 2018-04-02, John Hasler <jhas...@newsguy.com> wrote: > Mike Stone writes: >> Degaussing a hard drive will render it inoperative. It's also >> relatively hard to do/requires special equipment. (Just waving a >> refrigerator magnet around isn't going to do it.) > > The equipment required for degaussing isn't very special (though it > *does* require an AC magnet). However, a determined opponent can > probably recover data from a degaussed disk. Overwriting with zeros is > probably more effective with modern disks (the hard part may be making > sure every physical sector actually does get overwritten). > > If the device contains truly sensitive and important data destroy it. > For ordinary people, though, an erase program is more than adequate. > Nobody cares enough about your secrets to make any kind of a serious > effort to recover them from a scrapped disk.
I guess the only means of verifying whether your data has been effectively destroyed is by attempting to recover it; as the threat-scenarios spoken about here (by individuals) generally posit attackers (corporate or governmental) with more resources at their disposal than they have at theirs, this task proves to be more arduous (if not nigh on impossible) than the destruction itself. I took a hammer once to an old hard drive; frankly, I don't know whether I killed it or not. But they don't call 'em "hard" drives for nothin', I'll tell ya that. That sucker was ornery. I pretty seriously dented it, is all of which I'm certain. -- The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow. --Samuel Beckett
