On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Mike Branda wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 10:59 -0400, Robert Snyder wrote:
> >
> > >Did you mean Data Life Guard, that comes with their HD's? That only
> > >writes zero's to the disk; I gues I could run it a couple of times. Now,
> > >will that remove partitions, too?
>
> Yes the partitions will be gone but all you are doing is writing zero's
> over zero's. more than one pass is useless.
Well, on a very low level (I'm talking you need a clean room and very
expen$ive equipment to see it), overwriting may change the magnetic state of
very small areas near the read/write head. Not enough to matter if you rely
on the drive's firmware to read the data, for sure; but if reading what used
to be on the drive is _very_ important to you, you can tell what used to be
on a drive before it was overwritten by examining the leftover magnetic
fringes.
The more times you overwrite the drive with the same data, the smaller those
fringes become. They can be more garbled by using different data to write,
which is why I suggested multiple passes with /dev/random for those who have
a good reason to be paranoid (banks, stockbrokers, virus writers, drug
dealers, etc.).
-- -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactarHi! I'm a .sig virus! Copy me to your .sig!
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