I gotta say, physically destroying drives is serious overkill for the home user. If your company has something to prove to a regulatory body or are worried about legal requirements, sure, physically destroy the drives. If you're just wiping it because you may have had some personal info on it, a one-pass wipe is more than sufficient. Wipe the drives and donate them a center that builds computers for people in need. Or put them in an external case and give them to your relatives for backups. We use a 3 pass wipe with DBAN at work, it's plenty. Your personal data is probably worth a couple hundred bucks on the black market. It'll cost several thousand dollars to do data recovery on your old drive, and even that probably won't work if you wipe it once, and definitely won't work if you did a 3 or 7 pass wipe. The economics of data theft means it just doesn't pay to do. Recovering wiped data (really wiped, not just data on a dead drive) is only done by organizations with major resources - like big corporations or governments - and only for critical projects. Also, if you're paranoid enough to destroy a drive, you better run it through a chipper. Circuit boards can be replaced, drilled platters can be read in a clean room (minus the hole, of course), and running commodity magnets over drives generally does not do anything. You need a serious electromagnet and even that is sometimes not enough. My coworkers ran tests with magnetic coils and it didn't do anything to the drives at all. --Adam On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Robert Nesius <nesius at gmail.com> wrote: > I usually whack the circuit-board with a hammer after de-installing, drill > a hole through the platters, and run strong magnets over them too. > > -Rob > > > On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Jeremy MountainJohnson < > jeremy.mountainjohnson at gmail.com> wrote: > >> dc3dd wipe=/dev/<drive> >> >> or >> >> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive> >> ..or replace with zero with urandom for randomness. >> >> These will do a 1-pass to the entire disk with zeros. You can even >> confirm with a hexeditor. If someone still gets your residual data by >> physically playing around with the platters in a clean environment they >> probably deserve it =) >> >> -- >> Jeremy MountainJohnson >> Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com >> >> >> On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Jeff Jensen <jjensen at apache.org> wrote: >> >>> I have a few older PCs that I want to wipe the drives very well and >>> donate. Googling, I see quite a few apps to do so. What are current >>> top recs and approaches any of you have done? >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120119/0c3a9662/attachment.html>