On 04/01/2008, at 8:19 AM, Brad Tilley wrote:

quoted text
> One pass from /dev/zero is more than enough for all cases.

I agree that after a single pass of zeroes, getting anything but  
zeroes from a fully working, unaltered drive is not going to happen.

But if you remove the digital logic which masks residual signals via  
thresholds used to determine at what point a 1 is considered a 1 and a  
0 a 0, then perhaps 1's and 0's could be restored from some drives.  
Through the use of a replacement device that samples each bit with a  
bit depth greater than 1, allowing analysis to interpret what I would  
have thought would not be constant uniform samples.


I think more importantly, if it is comparatively very cheap to erase a  
drive in a paranoid manner and the leaking of that data could cost a  
fortune, then the comparatively small cost of paranoid erasure could  
be a risk worth taking.


Shane