Best Drive Wiper?

[Beeeyeee]

in your experience, whats the best Hard Drive total eraser?

[iamdarkyoshi]

A hammer.

[Amazingasian]

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[Jacktastic-Mofo]

A hammer.

Lol, my aunt works for the US ARMY and her job is to wipe drives, and then send them to a building next door to be incinerated.

[Juanse]

You can try to find a big a** magnet. 

[Juanse]

Lol, my aunt works for the US ARMY and her job is to wipe drives, and then send them to a building next door to be incinerated.

Why they don't just burn them down then, no need to wipe them first

[wpirobotbuilder]

in your experience, whats the best Hard Drive total eraser?

CCleaner is a good option. I used it recently to erase a drive to repurpose in someone else's computer.

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

Why they don't just burn them down then, no need to wipe them first

Double safety I guess? I mean what if an employee was trying to steal a HDD before it was incinerated.

[LionWaffles]

This thing ^

[DWN]

*cough*

 

use bios to wipe drive or dban ISO

encrypt drive

use bios to wipe drive or dban ISO again

done 

[Guest]

GParted. over-right the partition with zeros.

[Juanse]

This thing ^

That thing is old ah, it's IDE

[LancerBG]

A high powered magnet was what got the job done best and quickest in a pc class I took a while back. 

[BigDay]

initiate the secure erase command

 

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/secure-erase.html

 

ignore all the other responses, they are absolute shit

[Guest]

A big ass electromagnet?

Dban?

[Goodman2265]

My dad works for Time Warner and at the warehouse they have this machine that turns HDD's to fine powder 

[Viking Kong]

Used to run killdisk, but I've heard that's bad mmkay?

Now I just reformat when reinstalling windows.

Good enough for me.

 

Optional: Disassemble drive and destroy platters.

 May void warranty.  

[Viking Kong]

My dad works for Time Warner and at the warehouse they have this machine that turns HDD's to fine powder 

Uh, then what do they do with the powder?

i doubt that shit is recyclable.

[Beeeyeee]

A hammer.

haha I would but I have to use this for something else:P

[Goodman2265]

Uh, then what do they do with the powder?

i doubt that shit is recyclable.

They send it some where, idk where tho prob to get melted down into metal bars maybe

[LionWaffles]

That thing is old ah, it's IDE

Still, it works!

[somik]

We have something similar in our office. Ours is a bit smaller then this though.

[Blake]

in your experience, whats the best Hard Drive total eraser?

thermite.

 

Bar that, you basically just need to write 0s over the disk a few times. 1 pass isn't enough, and can still be recoverable, DOD require 12 passes, just makes it a lot harder to recover the information. heck, given enough money even then it is still recoverable, planes have gone down and they have still been able to recover enough data to restore useful data.

 

However you need to ask yourself, is someone really going to go to the effort to recover your info? Depends on how much the data is worth. Your <tech company> and just discovered how to economically do cold fusion? throw that drive into a smelter. Your personal drive with a few steam games installed? use it as a paper weight, or make the platters coasters, it isn't even worth it to erase.

[Mikensan]

We use a very large version of what Somik posted to erase disks and tapes. Then we throw it into an industrial grinder. Why? Because of the sensitivity of what is on the medium.

 

When you wipe an SSD, there is no residual magnetic state left behind, so you can feel confident with software solutions. If it is a mechanical drive, physical destruction is the best option if you really don't want people getting what is on it. After a certain point the thief or whomever trying to recover your data isn't going to spend large sums of money to recover your data, so you have to gauge how badly somebody would want what is on your drive, and take measures against it.

 

Nudes of yourself? Yea I think a triple pass DoD wipe using Darik's boot and nuke would be good. I don't think somebody is going to pay to send it out to be looked at under an electron microscope to pull your nudes off the drive. 

 

Evading taxes from the IRS and have incriminating evidence on your drive? Yea, write 0s for a week straight, dismantle, destroy each platter and bury in different states lol.

[EmeraldFlame]

If you still want the disks to be usable after, use DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke). You can boot into it from a CD/DVD/Flash Drive, and then have it do various wiping procedures depending on how securely you want it erased. But in reality a single pass to all 0's or all 1's is enough to irrecoverably erase all the data.