Destroying a hard drive

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Wed Jul 11 21:04:42 EDT 2007


On 7/11/07, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good practice would swap the disk out before it's too sick to reliably
> run core-utils shred(1).

  Be warned that with "fancy" filesystems (like EXT3 (with
data=journal) or ZFS), using shred(1) on individual files may not be
effective.  (See the man page for details.)  It should still work on
the whole-disk block device, though.

  Another interesting aspect of software sanitization: Modern disk
drives do lots of automatic remapping and error correcting and such,
below the level the OS normally "sees".  So there may be copies of
your data on the physical media that shred(1), DBAN, etc., cannot
touch, but a data recovery specialist could get to.

-- Ben


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list