Formatting before selling

[Fillado]

CCLEANER , WIPE DRIVE

Does upto 35 passes

Nobody should bother to do the 35 pass Gutmann Method.

To quote the person who wrote the paper on it:

In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now.

 

[Azuse05]

Nobody should bother to do the 35 pass Gutmann Method.

People always will. It's far better to go overkill and have peace of mind than worry about the bank details.

 

[CaptainCrash]

I never said there was one documented case.... again, try quoting in context. Just because something isn't "documented", doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

Oh, please, you're just retreating into semantics. By "documented", I meant "recorded evidence", which is usually what's required in these situations.

If you're going to assume that something *might* be possible simply because there's no evidence to disprove it, I guess you might be right on a philosophical level, but for practical purposes you're going to end up in the realms of the absurd rather quickly.

I can tell you that is a fact. Because of the nature of sensitive data stored on disks where I work, when PC's are retired, no matter how new or old the disks, they aren't reused, the platters are destroyed.

Yes, because the process of physically destroying disks is quick, inexpensive, relatively idiot-proof and can be easily verified, *not* because it's inherently any more secure, unless you're factoring possible human error into that assessment. If the magnetic domains are disrupted, they can't be restored to their previously ordered state any more than you could physically reassemble disk platters that had been ground to powder.

BTW, if you want to have a sensible debate about this, please lose the snide personal comments. My reply to your original post was admittedly a bit, well, brusque with hindsight, and feel free to respond in kind, but sarcasm is boring at the best of times and gets even more so when it's repeated.

 

[Fillado]

People always will. It's far better to go overkill and have peace of mind than worry about the bank details.

My point is that they might as well overkill what he recommends. In DBAN the PRNG Stream and then say 30 rounds (8 is recommended for "High" security...) instead of running rounds designed only to cover different encoding techniques which is what the Gutmann Method was written to do.