Securely Erasing Your Hard Drive - Comments Page 2

Love the video. Especially the keyboard with the key caps flying around!

Great one Jim,I couldn't stop laughing for 5 mins.Until I remembered how much I hate her and her ilk.

Great one Jim,I couldn't stop laughing for 5 mins.Until I remembered how much I hate her and her ilk.

Someday I hope someone parts the curtain for me so I can see what I'm missing. Why does it take multiple 'writes' of data over previously used HDD space, to wipe it clean? Ignoring the randomness of disk utilization, consider this: You have a 1MB picture of Mt. Rushmore on your HDD. You delete it and then overwrite the residual bits with a 1MB picture of migrating animals on an African plain. Is it really reasonable to expect some 'expert' could get access to the drive and find the picture of Mt. Rushmore? (I realize there is no guarantee the new picture would be assigned the same physical space on the drive, but for the purposes of my question let's assume it did.) So, then, if you deleted stuff you didn't want, defragged what remained, then copied multiple gigabytes of pictures onto the drive (total GBs equaling at least what you deleted), wouldn't that make life extremely difficult for someone trying to recover deleted data? If everything was overwritten with new pictures, how could anything old be recovered? If the old data was still there, wouldn't the new pictures be corrupted? What am I missing?

I sneak into the nearest nuclear power plant and drop my old hard drives into the fission reactor.

That's nothing!
I slingshot my old hard drives covered with crazy glue at a SpaceX rocket launch, and they end up in earth orbit.

Hey - RD - how did the hard drive get out of the slingshot?? LOL

I always secure erase my hard drive. If i use it to install windows I let windows do the format. It seem to help with speed.

To Herb, 12 March
Over-writing might not destroy the old bits. For instance, the new bits might be shifted relative to the old bits. Or the new bits, mixed with the old bits, might produce a different, recognizable, electric pulse as they whiz by the read sensors. Over-writing several times would very likely jumble the remnant info enough to make it useless.