If you want something done right (like making sure your data is no longer on someone else’s hard drive), you should really do it yourself.
Zeroing filling a hard drive isn’t hard.
Zeroing filling a hard drive isn’t hard.
This satisfies the infeasibility requirement of NIST SP 800-88 without relying on flash vendors to have appropriately implemented ATA command standards like secure erase, which almost none fully do.
This is also as opposed to relying on the self-encrypting feature on most modern flash. Whether you're dealing with high enough asset value to warrant this level of interest or are just beholden to the same standards, you should reach out to your flash vendor for clarification.
Why rely on hardware encryption, when software encryption is basically free?
`shred --force --zero /dev/sda`
should wipe the whole drive, overwriting 3 times (the default) with random bits and once with all zeroes.
This whole destruction thing is very economically and environmentally nonsensical to me.
Eg:
cryptsetup open --type plain --key-file /dev/urandom --key-size 256 $DEV crypttmp
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/crypttmp bs=4k
Renting physical hard drives does seem pretty dumb, though.
The hard drives had been used for data sharing servers at the prefectural government office and were replaced with new ones in the spring.
The prefectural government had deleted the data, but the successful bidder of the hard drives was able to restore them by using special software. The government is trying to locate the remaining nine hard drives, which were also sold online in July to August.
The data servers had been leased from Fujitsu Leasing Co., which commissioned Broadlink Co. to scrap the replaced hard drives.
Zero-filling, one-filling, and random-filling all the bits of a hard drive is sufficient to make previous data effectively unretrievable. That doesn’t sound like what happened here.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-pos...
I would bet a lot of money they dragged the files to the "recycle bin" then maybe emptied it
If they were external drives it's likely they were on FAT32 which makes it even easier
It's a way to shift inventory management to the supplier, the alternative would be to employ people to try to sell used 1U servers & components.
Those companies will then pick up your used server, wipe it, and sell it to someone else. Depending on the contract that'll include physically intact hard drives.