[vox-tech] Secure Wiping hard drives

[Brian Lavender]

I second DBAN.  Writing zeros may seem effective and probably can be in
certain cases, but if you think about it, all those zeros could easily
be represented in one small portion and the remainder be the old data.
There is no way to store random data in a caching mechanism, so
it would have to clear the drive. You might also consider scrub. It
is maintained by Jim Garlick at LLNL. 

http://code.google.com/p/diskscrub/


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 10:21:18AM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> DBAN looks like it will do what you want:
> 
> http://www.dban.org/
> 
> But you can't securely erase a drive without writing to every sector, 
> and that will take time.
> 
> More challenging is how to securely dispose of a defective drive.  I'd 
> use a sledgehammer.
> 
> Do a cost analysis and maybe a solution for the "safety requirements" 
> will magically appear.  :)
> 
> Rod
> 
> 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.
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture