[lug] drive free space "wiper" recommendation

[Chip Atkinson]

Have we come full circle now?  Something that provides modest security and
is fairly quick?  Assuming that the drive will be removed from the system
no matter what, it seems like one big rock or sledge dropped on top of the
drive will really accomplish the end goal of minimizing the time to "wipe"
the drive.  A hand drill would be more accurate and probably more likely
to guarantee success. It's likely that these two methods would be at least
as fast as writing a few G to the HD.

Initially there was a requirement(?) that the drive not be destroyed
because of not wanting to be wasteful.  However, are you really going to
use these tiny drives ever again?  Are you not being more wasteful by
occupying space that you are paying for (rent or mortgage) with drives
that will never be used?  

It seems that the optimal way to handle old disks is to find the fastest
way to make the data inaccessible, either through destruction or dd.  
Then strip the circuit board, send the disk to metals recycling and the
circuit board to electronic recycling and you are free.

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Glenn Murray wrote:
> > I'm claiming that the risk that
> > something valuable is going to be swiped off of one my old hard drives
> > is negligible.   The common crook isn't going to spend a lot trying to
> > recover dubious data from a wiped drive, and if the government wants
> > to throw that much resources at it then I'm toast anyway.
> 
> Indeed.  So all you really need is dd if=/dev/urandom ...
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: irc.hackingsociety.org port=6667 channel=#hackingsociety
>