Re: Quick Survey: How do you "dispose" of outbound hard drives??

[Eric Jernigan <eric.jernigan () PCC EDU>]

For the record: You can't pay me enough to try, so I haven't. But with
enough grant money... 

The source I recommend trying (if you haven't already) is Ray Descoteaux at
the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) for the UC San Diego
(rdesc () ucsd edu)

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml 

Eric Jernigan
Information Security Manager, 
Technology Solution Services
Portland Community College
PO Box 19000
Portland OR 97280-0990
503-977-4896
Eric.jernigan () pcc edu
http://www.pcc.edu/resources/tss/info-security/
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-----Original Message-----
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 10:30 AM
To: Eric Jernigan
Cc: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
Subject: Re: Quick Survey: How do you "dispose" of outbound hard drives??

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:17:57 PDT, you said:

> It may be a labor pain and a half to recover an overwritten drive but 
> the info on the disc may be worth taking to a recovery shop, 
> especially a "no questions asked recovery shop" to pull data from the
drive.

I've asked before, and I'll ask again - does *anybody* have any *actual*
evidence that recovery from even a single overwrite is in fact possible on a
modern drive (as opposed to the barely-doable work in Gutmann's paper from
1995 on MFM-encoded drives)?

Fires, dropped in a lake, run over by a truck, 'format c:', are all
recoverable.
*NOBODY* has, to my knowledge, demonstrated an *actual* ability to recover a
single-overwrite.

Feel free to cite actual evidence, I've been looking for a decade and still
coming up empty.