How much wiping do you do? :)

[cmerkel at gmail.com (Chris Merkel)]

> So, is it totally useless to wipe a drive more that once?

Yeah, pretty much. If you're really paranoid, do it twice.

> What would it take to get the data off of a drive wiped once with all zeros?

More money and resources than the value of your recovered data.

As for why DoD, they generally follow the NIST guidelines for wiping
disks from non-classified systems. I've head that if it's sensitive,
they only do physical destruction.Then again, they likely still are
doing 7 passes here and there. but keep in mind that this is the same
DoD that spent money on psychics to attempt to do remote viewing, so I
don't think they're always the fountain of best practices.

If you're up for some hot destruction action, check this out:
http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/hard_drives.htm

- Chris Merkel