The Homemade Hard Disk Destroyer 497
Barence writes "All businesses have sensitive data they need to destroy when they replace PCs, but disposing of hard disks properly can be an expensive business. This has led one IT manager in the UK to come up with his own, homemade solution — Bustadrive. It uses a powerful 'hydraulic punch' to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable, and requires nothing more than a pull of the lever on the front — similar to a drinks-can crusher. PC Pro tested the Bustadrive, and also sought the opinions of data destruction companies as to whether the device was really as effective as hoped, or just a fun way to mangle a hard disk or two."
Overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The paranoid crowd will argue that either method might still be able to be recovered. I thought I saw an article once here that in the real world basically debunked this myth. Physical destruction just takes the process one step further. Plus it's quicker then running some type of a disk wiping program.
Re:Overkill? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)
Even if only one technician in the entire world, with a billion-dollar lab, is capable of recovering the data from a zero'd drive, it's too much of a risk. What if that one technician is Chinese?
Oh, that's ok, my data isn't written in Chinese...
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't matter. They could still read images, sound recordings, schematics, spreadsheets of numbers...
Well, they COULD, except the West uses a different binary encoding scheme than the Chinese. Over here everything is written as ones and zeros, but over there everything is written as ones and zewos. And I doubt they have the technology to convert.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Informative)
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Every drive at my place of work does not leave. They have a big ole shredder that eats drives and spits out rice grain sized pieces of metal. This is for all drives, not just classified materials ones. Is too easy to be safe this way.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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With normal FS format options, that would only take care of a very small portion of the drive (FS metadata doesn't consume that much space) - it would be pretty easy extracting useful data using plain old software. A single-pass disk wipe would be a lot more useful :)
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What if that one technician is Binese?
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In soviet russia the chinese are you.
Re:Overkill? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd just use my rifle and a few rounds of .308 Winchester (or .303 British, 7.5mm Swiss, 8mm Mauser, whatever). Problem solved...
If you really want to go low tech, a sledgehammer would do fine.
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I consider this one of the best methods, you get three great things out of this: non-recoverable drives, frustrations worked out, and some really interesting conversation starters if you take it apart (the disk platter deforms in very interesting ways when hit!) For example: This Drive [flickr.com] is no longer readable, and if you look at any of the photos that show the top of the drive, you can see how the disk platter deformed.
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I'd just save them all up in a box and whenever I'd manage to make it out to the desert, I'd bring them with me. We'd shoot
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Where are you buying ammo?
Plinking:
300 win mag $22.95
http://www.jgsales.com/product_info.php/products_id/3153 [jgsales.com]
Hunting
$31.95
http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/15754-5.html [cheaperthandirt.com]
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I used to work (~5 years ago), we used an erasure tool that wrote random data over the entire drive (10 times), then introduced the drive to "Mr. Band Saw" in the machine shop, to quarter the platters, on any DoD/DoE stuff
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A collegue of mine used to work at a financial institution where they had a special heat resistant receptacle for hard disk destruction. They put the stacks of hard disks down, put thermite packs on top, closed the lid, and punched the "ON" button. Said slag after cooldown was then put out for scrap metal.
Another place didn't go with the thermite, but instead had an industrial grade shredder where the drives were tossed in, and parts the size of marbles came out the other end.
Both methods work. The therm
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Last time I needed to really kill a drive, I put it in the lathe, and turned the platters - nice snall swarf chips
Not Overkill (Score:3, Informative)
I do work at a DOE site..
The current method is now an industrial shredder.. Nothing left bigger than a dime..
This goes for Hard Drives, Flash drives, cell phones.. Anything that can store data never goes out. till it's been through the shredder.
See one in action [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone should suggest that the Mythbusters "put this to the test," assuming their production company has the financial resources to pay for even modest data recovery services.
Even that might be effective. If you have like, a dozen drives, all of them similar, all of them wiped, one of which contains good data (or worse, a group of which once comprised like, a RAID 5 array so you need at least a few of them) you would be looking at a hypergeometric distribution, and the actual probable cost of recovering
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Of course it's a security risk. If the disk fell into the wrong hands they my not be able to read everything from your system but they certainly could read bits of useful information. If it's from a RAID 5 or RAID 6 volume they may only get bits and pieces of data but something like a RAID 0 or RAID 1 volume could glean lots of useful data. Think of it sort of like a shredded classified document. RAID 5 or 6 means they may have a handful of the shreds of the document, and any of those could contain snip
Re:Overkill? (Score:4, Interesting)
For exactly that sort of reason, though, most decent business vendors will(for a little extra, or if you prod the rep) offer an HDD warranty option where you don't have to send back the dead drive in order to receive a replacement, and can destroy it onsite as you wish. Simply giving you the drive back would be useless, since it is more or less impossible to determine whether or not the contents have been duplicated once it is out of your hands.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Interesting)
A degausser weakens the magnetized regions, but it's still at least theoretically possible to read it if it's not done thoroughly enough. What I don't get is why you don't just take it apart and sand the platters clean. There's zero chance of reading it after that, and it's a lot less energy intensive than actually chunking the platters. Extra credit if you use the disk drive motor to spin the disk so that you can sand it without any actual effort...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can always melt it [backyardmetalcasting.com]. A blast furnace will degauss it for you too, for no additional fee ;-)
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)
Extra bonus points if you scrub the platters with fluorine trichloride before putting it through the thermite reaction.
Even then, you'll never be fully comfortable with the job until you destroy the entire galaxy that the drive was in. Maybe the whole universe. You can't be too sure.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Informative)
Just destroying the universe after the disk failed isn't enough. If many-worlds is true (and the paranoid sysadmin must consider this possibility), the fact that you destroyed the universe in this world doesn't guarantee that the data isn't destroyed in any other world. Indeed, you have to setup the universe-destroying device before writing the first bit of data onto the drive, and have it automatically triggered if it can't detect any accesses to the drive any more (after all, you might forget to activate it by hand in some of the universes). Only by setting it up before writing data you ensure that it will be in every universe where the disk contains any data, despite all the universe splitting going on.
Rule 37: There is no 'overkill' (Score:3)
Rule 37: There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload'. [schlockmercenary.com]
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Informative)
Pseudorandom wipe can apparently do an 80gb drive (hooked up via usb) in about 40 minutes.
If youre doing multiple passes, you may want to make sure that doing it via overwrites (rather than destruction) is really good enough for your data
Re:Overkill? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure it can. And then someone can use techniques such as MFM, SPM or STM [usenix.org] to recover the disk. And then there is this patent [freshpatents.com] which notes that data is often partially written off the track, and thus can't be wiped.
I guess for most people's purposes something like DBAN will work well. But for the truly paranoid, you really need to read NIST's recommendation [nist.gov] that you clear, purge and destroy. And by destroy, they mean that you use "Disintegration, Pulverization, Melting, and Incineration." At a "outsourced metal destruction or licensed incineration facility with the specific capabilities to perform these activities effectively, securely, and safely", no less.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it's a foreign government willing to do a molecular scale image of the entire disk with a scanning tunnelling electron microscope and then have a large team of people painstakingly apply heuristics and get back some small fraction of the stored data in a few years time
Even that is impossible. The first problem is that an electron microscope can even read a drive in the first place. It can't. You need a magnetic reading device of some sort. You can't even read a normal, non-wiped drive with an electron microscope.
The second problem is using the term "small fraction". Unless you mean really, really small, on the level of maybe a few random bytes out of a terabyte drive small, even with the best existing reading/recovery device, one pass zero is sufficient.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Informative)
Gutmann's paper was based on 1990-era technology. And even then you didn't need all 35 passes, just the ones that correspond to the encoding used on the disk. If I read the enhanced version of the paper [auckland.ac.nz] correctly, restoring even plainly overwritten data from a modern disk is a hopeless task.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the enhanced version on his homepage, he says that he didn't update the paper because it is practically unfeasable to try and restore overwritten data from a modern disk. In the epilogue he says:
In the real world, fire is a bad solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would be the better solution.
A small terracotta pot without a hole in the bottom of it + a small amount of thermite is the cheapest way, thermite is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out.
Even if we did it outside at my place of work, we'd get complaints from the neighbors. A mechanical/hydraulic crusher/bender thing could be made into something that looks like an office appliance.
Nothing says "no data recovery" like a drive reduced to its elemental components.
Except it's not. Burning is generally a process of rapidly combining reactants, not dividing them up. Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly - having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
whiner (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out
charred corpses don't terminate jobs
Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly
data processing including the manufacture and operation of hard drives is already environmentally unfriendly, and oxidizing metals is one way to get them back toward the more natural state for this world
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
Just do it right outside the door to your building, and blame it on the other people hanging around there.
Re:In the real world, fire is a bad solution (Score:4, Interesting)
We actually use thermite and sledgehammers at my work place to destroy old hard drives.
A stack of 3 of them, a line across the platter area, and a large 20lb sledge to hit them afterwards.
We've had issues in the past with hard drive processing places actually sending them overseas for disposal, but they end up getting recycled and reused.
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Bollocks.
Get cancer and you can win the Tour de France.
It's true, I saw it on the tee vee.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one simple thing about physical destruction. It is obvious to an observer that the drive is unusable. If someone has a pile of drives, one before DBAN, one after, it wouldn't be hard for someone to move some drives into the after pile either as a prank, or perhaps to get the information once it leaves the location. Physical destruction prevents this from happening, because almost anyone can tell the difference between a pile of scrap metal and a hard disk that looks like it might function.
Stand drill (Score:5, Informative)
I just use a stand drill. I goes through all the platters and the circuitboard.
Fairly easy to find and purchase.
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Whatever happened to just taking ride to closest foundry and throwing disk to molten iron vat?
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, haven't you read the Trilogy? It takes half a book just to cross Mordor, plus there's Orcs and shit. That's way more trouble than it's worth. And have you ever tried to find Middle Earth on a map? Sure, lots of people have theories, but what with continental drift and such, it's all pretty obscure. How can you be sure the volcano you use is *really* Mount Doom in this late, degenerate age?
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Funny)
The folks in Accounting must love your expense and mileage reports.
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, haven't you read the Trilogy? It takes half a book just to cross Mordor, plus there's Orcs and shit. That's way more trouble than it's worth. And have you ever tried to find Middle Earth on a map? Sure, lots of people have theories, but what with continental drift and such, it's all pretty obscure. How can you be sure the volcano you use is *really* Mount Doom in this late, degenerate age?
Because of all the Orcs and shit?
Re:Stand drill (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd guess the foundry people would object to contaminating their carefully selected alloy...
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stand drill (Score:5, Interesting)
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You broke my heart!
i joyfully clicked that link, eager to see a frozen hard drive shatter like glass. But all i found was a T2 clip. Now i have blue-eyeballs and have to watch a few Will It Blend videos.
Thanks for nothing!
__
i've always wanted to try using duct tape to strap an HD to a sledge hammer. If i used enough tape, the pieces would stay somewhat together. Eventually i'd have a duct tape bag full of HD bits.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I used to just throw the old disks into the next black hole, relying on Stephen Hawking being right that all information thrown into a black hole is gone forever. Now he says he was wrong, and all the information from my hard disks may eventually be returned from the black hole. Does anyone know if this device can also be used to destroy black holes?
Re:Stand drill (Score:4, Funny)
I goes through all the platters and the circuitboard.
IM IN UR GARAGE GOES THRU UR HDDRV.
This is just a controlled hammer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is just a controlled hammer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is just a controlled hammer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is just a controlled hammer (Score:5, Funny)
Good safety advice! Never go close to kids without protective gear.
Re:This is just a controlled hammer (Score:4, Funny)
If you'd had your protective gear on in the first place, there wouldn't be a kid to go near....
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You could also give it to some trainee employees with the same tool, works like a charm. Eventually you can also hover above the exposed platters with a strong magnet, just to be sure. (Yes, I witnessed this, lot's of fun).
For folks that want to destroy huge number of HDD's on a regular basis, just get a proper degausser as those do not cost a fortune and get the job done well, without doubt. You may even be able to reuse the drives afterwards.
Re:This is just a controlled hammer (Score:5, Informative)
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Underkill? (Score:3, Insightful)
Jokes aside, from the FA: "The Bustadrive, then, looks like itâ€(TM)ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
So what they're saying is, this doesn't do the job as well as something like one of those DOD disc scraper/shredder things, but it is more fun, which I guess makes it news worthy?
lots of options out there! (Score:4, Insightful)
My drill press makes for a very effective drive killer.
Use what you got!
7.62mm holes (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:7.62mm holes (Score:5, Funny)
7.62mm seems like an unusual size for a drill bit, and what kind of drill are you managing to use at up to 100m? Seems like a longer distance than I've seen any normal pillar drill move over.
I do agree that not removing the circuit board causes lots of debris, though, and is especially dangerous when it spins off at an angle!
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Not 100%, but otherwise cost-effective given risk? (Score:2, Insightful)
As the RTF states, data can be re recovered, given a financial budget & time.
But I wonder. I posed the same question to a buddy awhile back, and he suggested baking the disks in an oven at 250 degrees C for an hour. The idea being that well, yeah, sure the magnetic platters can theoretically be recovered given time, budget, and determination. But still, the printed circuit board, etc. would be melted and thus ruined. Seems just as sensible, and more cost effective given readily available tools, (and suf
Re:Not 100%, but otherwise cost-effective given ri (Score:3, Informative)
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Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
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Re:Not 100%, but otherwise cost-effective given ri (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not 100%, but otherwise cost-effective given ri (Score:4, Informative)
There's a discussion at http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-454159.html [ocforums.com] of a few different magnetic materials used in drives and Curie points with a few links to where they got the source data from.
Oblig... (Score:5, Funny)
Destroy the data, not the drive (Score:2)
Re:Destroy the data, not the drive (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet it takes less time to plug the machine in and boot off a CD than it does to open the case, remove the drive, and then smash it.
Not if you actually let the software RUN, it doesn't. Using DBAN on a 500 GB drive can take days, whereas this solution takes a few minutes at most. Your solution is only practical if you have one hard drive to destroy, and it is attached to a machine. The usual situation is the hard drive died and you replaced it with a good one, now need to make sure the dead one is REALLY dead before you toss it. Or, you have a batch of them that need to go because you're refreshing PCs.
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RTFA. This is about drives that they don't want to use again. They're being thrown out. They just want to make sure no dumpster-diving hacker gets all their data.
Gross Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
Gutmann was wrong (Score:5, Informative)
There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data [nber.org] that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.
Re:Gutmann was wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Physically overwritten sectors are (almost) certainly unrecoverable. But what about remapped 'bad' sectors? AFAIK these cannot be accessed in any way by software wiping tools, but could be accessed and potentially read by tweaked drive firmware. They might be overwritten if you use the drive's own firmare erase command if it supports this.
Re:Gutmann was wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
There was an interesting bugtraq thread in 2005. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me pull a bugtraq posting from 2005 out for perusal. There are other interesting tidbits in that thread too.
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Jul/0464.html [seclists.org]
===
From: dave kleiman
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:30:30 -0400
Here is a quote directly from Peter I received Saturday, he asked to have it
passed on to the list.
-Snip-
>I'd love to hear some thoughts on this from security and data experts
>out there.
People should note the epilogue to the paper:
Epilogue
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the
35-
pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo
incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis
of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the
voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect
than
a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass
overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios
involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers
everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that
statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses
encoding
technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you
never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a
few
passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A
good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected".
This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing
data
density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and
use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that
anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps one or two
levels via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the the
drives
in use at the time that this paper was originally written have mostly
fallen
out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-
density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-
density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and
can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able
to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces are
close to zero.
Peter.
===
Easier home made method (Score:4, Informative)
There are commerical version that do alot better bending job, try http://www.garner-products.com/ [garner-products.com] for videos and pictures to gladden your hard drive destroying heart.
Easiest, Cheapest (Score:5, Funny)
Mail it to yourself via registered mail and then refuse deliver. Once it enters the Post Office loop, it'll never be seen again.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Reduce - Buy the biggest disks you can afford, they're worth repurposing and you won't have to spend as much on successors or the attendant labor.
Reuse - Repurpose disks for other purposes. Use last years' disks as part of your backup solution. Secure-format them on a low-power machine and put them on eBay.
Recycle - There must be SOMEONE willing to break the drives down and give you back the platters for destruction. There's significant aluminum in some of those drives.
All this crushing, drilling, and shooting of drives is fun. But it's also extremely wasteful. I understand destroying the drives if lives are at stake, but otherwise, stop.
ARGH! Physical destruction is the wrong answer!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, everyone comes up with these elaborate schemes to physically destroy disks, as a means of destroying data. Let's say this one MORE time: Can your method provide with a consistent, known, and guaranteed level of data destruction?
Consider the terms I used here.
1) Consistent: Is this going to be the same for every drive?
2) Known: How much effort in terms of hours and dollars is required to recover some or all of the data?
3) Guaranteed: Oh, really? Prove it to me!
With a software wipe, you can calculate (and measure) residual magnetism, and also account for 'hidden' areas on the disk (recovery sectors, etc.) With a hardware destruction method, what can you guarantee me?
In fact, the gushing article from PCPro even shows the weaknesses of this method:
"The Bustadrive, then, looks like it'll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
Whereas, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge, a single random overwrite will wipe data beyond any hope of recovery. A pass with DBAN will wipe it completely out, and if you pay for EBAN support, you can even get a certificate guaranteeing the data destruction.
Why are people so determined to destroy disks, rather than data? Even worse, people are eager to PAY for questionable disk destruction methods, rather than just simply destroy the data--what they want gone in the first place.
Re:The Columbia test (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The Columbia test (Score:5, Interesting)
That means heating the whole drive for long enough that the platters get hot and not just heating the outside of the thing the drive is in for a few minutes.
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If the thermite is on top of the drive, it won't just heat the outside; it will rapidly melt the outside then fall into the interior of the drive. Thats the point. Youtube abounds with vidoes of thermite burning down through car engines, and hard drive cases are a lot less substantial.
Re:I'll fuck it up good. (Score:5, Funny)
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I agree...
There was an article on 2600 recently about ATA Security Specification. You can apparently use it to perform a secure wipe which is what the DoD uses these days. Two passes at different offsets (-10% and +10%) to prevent recovery of magnetic data from the 'edges' of the sectors with a scanning electron microscope or something crazy like that. Rather than the crazy 36-pass wipe or something they used back in the day.
If it's good enough for the government spooks, its a good place to start for us.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My university group manages about 500 systems, mostly various flavors of solaris & linux with a few other unixes tossed in. First off, trying to encrypt all the disks in all of those systems (some of which are HUGE) would be a massive undertaking. Then there's the issue of trying to find an encryption system that's compatible across all these systems, the additional overhead needed to do the encryption/decryption, and the process of storing the encryption keys for all these systems. It's simply not w
Re:Waste of Time, Money and Good Equipment (Score:4, Informative)
If you are wiping a hard disk to reassign within a company, and the hard drive isn't requiring top security, I've found that using HDDErase and DBAN are a good combo. HDDErase performs a complete erase on the controller level using ATA firmware commands (zeroing even the relocated sectors), then following up by usage of DBAN will put the chance of any recovery past anyone but the most determined.
Bonus points if you use TrueCrypt or BitLocker, so to ensure that a HDD is wiped, you just do a quick format, or a once over with zeroes. If you format a BitLocker drive in Windows 7, the format command explicitly zeroes out the areas with the volume keys on it making it impossible to recover the rest of the volume (more info here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512654.aspx [microsoft.com]).