Re: Hard Drive eraser recommendation

[ron () gmail com]

Here are some more links to other software, one hardware solution and a couple of articles digging into the topic of HD 
wipe and data recovery.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=129 - How to Really erase a hard drive.  This blog from 2007 also mentions the ATA 
drive "Secure Erase" built in command.  There is more info in the comments.

http://www.ics-iq.com/index.cfm/action/product.show/id_product/433e6b6c-3247-49ed-b6f9-16f356acc67a/id_category/24e3fd9e-e45d-489e-a15b-6fcd2f807f0d?CFID=12079844&CFTOKEN=69370159
 - this is a $2500 hardware solution, handles 9 drives at a time (sorry no personal experience with it)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd334519.aspx - info about SDelete, Secure Delete, a Sysinternals program 
created before they sold out to MS

http://eraser.heidi.ie/ - Eraser Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows which allows you to completely remove 
sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with 
Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008.

Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html  - an Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data?  (this 
was written in 2003)

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html - Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State 
Memory  Peter Gutmann, 1996

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Data-Wiping-Myth-Put-to-Rest-102376.shtml (January 2009) summaryizes studies


Overwriting Hard Drive Data By Dr. Craig Wright January 2009.  This story was linked to in another post, but it is no 
longer available. The Dr. posted the article for a while back in January.  I have a copy.  He documents results of a 
fairly intense investigation of older and new drives. Not to steal his thunder, here are a couple of snips from the 
conclusions:
<snip>
Although there is a good chance of recovery for any individual bit from a drive, the chances of recovery of any amount 
of data from a drive using an electron microscope are negligible. Even speculating on the possible recovery of an old 
drive, there is no likelihood that any data would be recoverable from the drive. 
</snip>

And for a little contrast, a study on recovering data, ie after a "disaster not after wipe.  Bottom line, not easy and 
getting more difficult as data density increases

http://www.actionfront.com/whitepaper/Drive%20Independent%20Data%20Recovery%20TMRC2005%20Preprint.pdf - 
Drive-Independent Data Recovery: The Current State-of-the-Art (2005)
   

HTH
Ron


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