On Fri, 7 Feb 2014 08:29:19 -0600 Matt Garman <matthew.garman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > FWIW, I use a program called "shred" when I'm done with a disk. Disks are not always alive when they need to be thrown out, I'd say it's very much to the contrary. And while the drive electronics may be bust so it doesn't even detect in the computer, all your data could still sit perfectly intact on the plates. Of course a physical destruction of the disk is an option in this case, but what if instead of throwing away such a disk, you need to RMA it to the vendor (or send to a data recovery company)? It's the absolutely worst case: an untold number of people will have unlimited access to your data after they repair the drive, for as long as they want (they can make a full copy). Having said all of the above, I do think it is an overkill to use encryption above/below RAID5/6 to protect against such cases. I feel that "they" get only a crude haircomb-like view of the data (every 6th 64KB or whatever) is enough to effectively make the data unusable. Of course there's still 1 in 6 chance, for a 6-device RAID, that your passwords, or your private ssh key, or whatever, will fall entirely into that 64KB portion that was on the drive in question, and someone will be determined-enough that in the absense of a working filesystem look through all of the drive and find it. But I think that's a risk we can learn to live with. :) -- With respect, Roman
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