Gaming Formatting hard drive once enough?

[Narin]

The best way to get rid of incriminating data on a hard drive is to take an powerful electromagnet and run it over the hard drive platter. Or just incinerate the hard drive, but you'd get fined for emission of toxic chemicals.

Might hurt the resale value.

Nah, could say that the disc is completely safe against prying eyes. Now they won't be able to recover any data from the disc because the disc has no more data retention capabilities!

 

[Strokemouth]

We used to use one of these at my last job. I don't think it was this same model, but same outcome. We also had a disc shredder that was pretty badass, but I'd keep a stack of CD/DVDs that needed disposal and take them out back and whip them against the side of the building. I don't think that is considered HIPAA compliant, but it made for a fun lunch hour.

 

[Harsky]

As much fun as it is to literally destroy a HDD, I only just bought this last year and I want to sell it to get some money towards a new internal HDD.

I spent £70 on it when it was brand new then suddenly it started corrupting my winrar files so even after formatting and doing a single pass on the unused space, I don't want to risk it again.

Also, I want to check to see if it's truely recovered any programs so I tried Getdataback but it says it takes 15 hours.

I don't want to run my computer overnight so is there a way to check to see if data is recoverable quickly?

 

[Harsky]

So I tried a little experiement to see if the single pass really is enough. I dug out my 16mb SD card and put in a variety of files. Mainly JPGS and winrar/winzip files then formatted it and used Recuva to see what I could dig out. The JPGS can be recovered then I decided to use the program that I used on my external HDD to do a single pass wipe and then used Recuva again.

As I hoped, it did get rid of it but now I'm wondering why it can't recover winrar/winzip.

 

[Scorpei]

So I tried a little experiement to see if the single pass really is enough. I dug out my 16mb SD card and put in a variety of files. Mainly JPGS and winrar/winzip files then formatted it and used Recuva to see what I could dig out. The JPGS can be recovered then I decided to use the program that I used on my external HDD to do a single pass wipe and then used Recuva again.

As I hoped, it did get rid of it but now I'm wondering why it can't recover winrar/winzip.

Aside from the fact that I am quite interested to learn that flash memory apparently also has retention of data (unless you just moved it to the trashcan instead of really deleting it), it will most probably yield quite a different result from a HD.

To be frank, if you're as paranoid as I am I'd take that HD (for all I care buy a cheap USB-->IDE/SATA convertor from DX or someplace, shouldn't be more then 5 USD) hook it up to some not-so power hungry machine (ur laptop or something) and just have it run a random data write a few more times. You could also try that 15 hour recovery tool of yours.

A funny thing to mention, recently a drive from the crashed spaceshuttle (columbia) was recovered and data was pulled from it. (Nearly) 99% of all research data on the drive was saved that way. Just to show you how resiliant those buggers can be

.

 

[Talaria]

Just set it on fire, smash it with a hammer, drop from the top of a building and then chuck some paint on it and a umbrella and sell it as art.

Thus resulting in $$$$