[vox-tech] Secure Wiping hard drives

[Alex Mandel]

On 05/11/2012 09:32 AM, Darth Borehd wrote:
> We need a fast way to securely wipe hard drives.
> 
> Is there really any way to recover data after doing 1 pass writing zeros to
> every sector? (This is what we are doing now using the free version of
> Active Killbits, but it takes over an hour per hard drive.)
> 
> If we repartition and reformat Windows NTFS drives as Ext3, is there any
> way to recover data from them?  (We found this method is faster, but are
> not sure if it is as secure as the above.)
> 
> The company will not pay for a degausser.
> 
> Safety requirements prevent us from doing physical destruction of the
> "sledge-o-matic" variety.
> 
> We use a computer recycler, but do not trust them 100% to destroy our
> data.  We know for a fact that equipment they get from us sit unguarded in
> a warehouse for months before destruction.
> 
> Interested in hearing opinions on this.

Maybe using dd would be faster, since you can do it from DSL linux or
some other tiny bootable linux on a usb stick. Though if it has to write
a bit to every sector of course it's going to take a while. The cool
part here is you can do more than 1 drive at a time (if the drives are
being taken out of machines and connected to the wiping machine).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

My non CS understanding is you should 0 everything, other stuff obscures
the data but doesn't remove it. So depending on the tools and how crafty
a thief is something is recoverable.

I'm sure someone else here has much more to say/explain/suggest.

Enjoy,
Alex