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Welcome_fags ago

Question: What should I do with old hard drives? Shred?

wipe them off with a cloth.

NonsenseAbounds ago

Seriously though, I haven't really seen an effective way, using technology, to really truly make a hard drive 100% unrecoverable.

Write zeroes? It like has fuckin magnetic residue or some shit and using the writing algorithm they can reconstruct the data or something.

To me, the classics never go out of style. Hammer, sandpaper, optional woodchipper, then fire. It's not too hard to get wood to burn blue.

tl;dr If it's a mound of slag I'm 100% certain it can't be recovered.

jackfraser ago

A single pass of zeros is sufficient for just about any hard drive bigger than an early 80s 10mb ST-566 disk. Even at that time, an electron microscope was needed to guess what individual bits used to be prior to wiping, and that has a pretty high error rate.

There's no way anyone's recovering from a full zero wipe; and if you want, you can do a random wipe or a multiple pass wipe with a tool like DBAN, but it's probably unnecessary.