On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 16:37:26 -0700, "Dean S. Messing" <deanm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Thanks to all for the replies. > > I'll answer most of the comments here. > > 0) The disk is unmounted. > > 1) The drive is (was) a backup drive with a great deal of sensitive > corporate laboratory research data and algorithms on it. The > monitary loss of the data being stolen would be significant though > it's hard to put a $$ value on it. More importantly, I'm following > corporate policy. > > 2) The drive is under extended warranty and so I'm sending it back for > a new drive. The Power Supply in the enclosure is bad. The actual > drive is still good, but they want the whole thing back for a > replacement. Sanding off the oxide and then melting the drive > probably won't go over well with the manufacturer. Given 1, this seems like a foolish policy. Just eat the cost as part of securing your data. It might be cheaper than having you keep an eye of multiple write passes covering several days. > 3) Writing zeros is a not a good idea if the data is valuable. The > small latent magnetic orientation info left from the previously > written data is not _that_ hard to recover with $5000 equipment, so > I've read. Multiple passes of random patterns are needed to make > recovery costly. There was some old documentation that claimed reading the remmants from previous writes were recoverable, though I don't remember seeing costs estimates that low. I would have expected a lot of human time needed to help deal with the incomplete recovery. If one can recover a significant amount of data after writing zeros, one is going to be able to do it after writing a single pass of random data as well. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
