On Thursday 19 January 2006 10:40, Deep Thinker wrote:
Hello all,
I am in the process of moving and I want to get rid of (sell, donate, give away) all of my old spare parts and self made boxes. I have about 20 hard drives of various sizes and I need to get rid of them as well. My question is, how can I make absolutely sure that all the data has been erased from those drives before I give them away.
The drives all came from clients that I did upgrades for and they did not want to keep the old systems. I have no idea which drives have sensitive information on them and which ones do not.
Thanks for any suggestions in advance.
-- d33p th1nk3r
They only way to make 100% sure the data is unrecoverable is to physically melt the aluminum platters, either in a furnace, or perhaps with an oxy-acetylene torch. The reason for this is that regardless of how to rewrite BS data to the drive, old copies of the data can be recovered using a scanning tunneling microscope from the magnetic molecules at the periphery of each bit. To eliminate this, you have to completely destroy the order of the disk, and that requires changing the physical state of the metal in the disk platters. If you have a mechanic friend, I suggest you grab some beer, and make a party of torching to drives! Mark