On 9/27/2013 7:05 AM, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote: >> At a former place of employment we would simply not leave hard drives in >> >servers or desktops that were intended to be recycled or junked. The hard >> >drives got disposed of separately (in this case crushed with a hydraulic >> >wedge). > Hah! When we have one that's failed, it gets deGaussed here. (Except for > old, 1.5x height SCSI drives, for which they "don't have a frame". Then we > unscrew the thing, and disassemble, and have cool magnets, and pretty > disks (which we can bend, or hit with a hammer). ours are collected in a secure area, then once a month or so a chipper truck comes by and grinds them up to dust. my feelings on disk erasure, based on years and years of being ni this industry (I started programming in 1973 with FORTRAN and punchcards, and worked on disk device drivers in the late 70s, early 80s, and work for a storage company now these last 15 years). DOD xxxxwhatever is obsolete and meaningless. its not even used by the DOD anymore, they physically destroy anything secret. to reasonably safely erase an modern disk (thats anything since MFM/ESDI became obsolete), one pass of anything (1's is fine) and one pass of zeros is more than sufficient... EXCEPT modern disks have automatic bad block remapping, and its /very/ possible for there to still be readable albeit old data on those bad blocks. if that possibility of data leakage is unacceptable, physical destruction is appropriate. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos