
How to wipe a hard drive - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/125619-how-to-wipe-a-hard-drive
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sciurus
From the article: "Both Quick Erase and DoD Short should be more than enough
to prevent people from snooping on your data — but if you want to be really
certain that no one, including the feds, can read your data, use 8-pass PRNG
Stream."

On a modern drive, quick erase (a single pass writing random data) is good
enough to keep anyone from reading your data. As Peter Gutmann says in the
Further Epilogue to his famous paper [0]:

"Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high
densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even
get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could
magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that
to recover the original data would be quite challenging."

[0] <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html>

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mistercow
>Hit it with a hammer

That's not really good enough to destroy sensitive data. Even if you break the
platters into 1/64 in² pieces, each one will still carry 10s or 100s of
megabytes. Recovering the data off of those fragments will be very expensive,
so an embarrassing love letter is probably safe at that point, but if you're
destroying something more valuable to a hostile third party, it's not going to
be adequate.

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warpspeed
I worked at a tech shop for a little while where we would routinely have to
dispose of customer's hard drives. Our solution was writing zeros to the disk,
then driving a big metal pin through the drive. It seemed like an effective
system.

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chx
Pfffft. [http://hackaday.com/2008/09/16/how-to-thermite-based-hard-
dr...](http://hackaday.com/2008/09/16/how-to-thermite-based-hard-drive-anti-
forensic-destruction/) thermite solves your problem.

