[Gllug] Securely disposing of old hard drives

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 12:10:04PM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> 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.

I'd like to avoid having to dismantle a computer with PATA (if I even
have one - I'm not sure) and plug in each drive in turn, and reboot
the computer and so on.

> 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.  :-)

These drives are really obsolete.  I think the largest one is 2 GB
or similar.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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