[Gllug] Securely disposing of old hard drives

[John Winters]

I'm intrigued by the number of people advocating destruction.

IIRC, the original brief was that MI5-grade was *not* required.  Most of 
the suggestions so far seem to have been made on the assumption that 
MI5-grade is required.

Surely a simple pass of sfill or just dd'ing several different sources 
(/dev/zero, /dev/urandom) to the entire disc would be enough to secure 
the drives against all but the most determined data-recoverer with 
extremely expensive equipment?  Is your data worth somebody spending a 
six figure sum to recover?  I suspect not - mine certainly isn't.

Once I'd done that to a disc I'd be happy to Freecycle it.  Destroying a 
perfectly functional device goes against the grain.  If I did that sort 
of thing I'd never end up with 29 computers.  :-)

John
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