To Erase or Not to Erase?
There are several levels of hard drive security erasure and many reasons to want information destroyed.
- Every hard drive reused by FREE GEEK Michiana receives a basic level of security erasure.
- Drives selected for recycling are pierced using a drill press. A drilled hard drive is worthless to all but an elite few
professional snoops.
The Major Leagues of Security
If you or your company want a higher degree of security, FREE GEEK Michiana will provide it for you.
FREE GEEK Michiana asks for a donation for each hard drive we wipe clean beyond our basic security wipe.
A good security erasure is 3-4 passes over the entire hard drive with special software. We wouldn't expect a Bill Gates sized donation for that.
CIA or Department of Defense level security takes more time, 22-35 passes with special software. So we ask for a larger donation per unit.
Hard Drive Scrubbing Software
If you want to scrub your hard drive clean before donating it to FREE GEEK Michiana, try these Open Source programs.
You can also download hard drive utility tools from manufacturers such as Western Digital or Seagate which write a single pass of zeros across the formatted surface of the drive.
References
Old Hard Drives Yield Data Bonanza - C/NET news.com
Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices. Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat.
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory - Peter Gutmann.
Encryption and Security Related Resources - Peter Gutmann
|
Hard Drive Erasure
