On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Matt wrote:

> What are some tools to securely erase a hard disk?

Depends.  Do you want the disk to be reusable, or is physical destruction 
an option?

For the former, you could overwrite the entire disk with junk (/dev/random 
for instance) multiple times, but that's time consuming.

For the latter, 5.56mm rounds will do a number on it, but with the rising 
cost and scarcity of quality ammo, that's becoming a less appealing means 
for data security, especially if you have many drives to dispose of.

A while back, Atlantic.net needed to dispose of a bunch of old 2GB SCSI 
drives.  I just whacked each one several times with a big hammer.  To get 
any data off them, you'd have to disassemble the drive and either somehow 
straighten the platters or come up with a means for reading deformed 
platters.  Probably not worth the effort for 10 year old usenet posts or a 
shadow file with passwords nobody uses anymore.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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