[clug] Secure Erase of disks/drives

[Alex Satrapa]

On 08/05/2007, at 16:45 , Robert wrote:

> That was written 10 years ago. And the features sizes used on  
> modern disks have gone down by an order of magnitude or two since  
> then.
> I'm not convinced that there is any credible risk here.

If the feature size has gone down an order of magnitude, doesn't that  
mean the detection hardware has improved by a similar margin? If the  
technology is viable to the point of mass production, there is  
certainly specialist technology out there that is an order of  
magnitude more accurate. There has to be as part of the development,  
testing and quality control process for the mass-produced item.

You are not paranoid enough!

But the bottom line is still this: if you have no reason to expect  
that the data stored on your hard disk is of any special interest to  
anyone, just write zeroes or random garbage over it to prevent casual  
recovery.

Alex