How &$%^£*&! hard can it be to securely destroy a hard disc????

The biggest exposure with Windows users, is them not knowing that the "format" command, does not overwrite the data clusters on the disk. After a "format", the buyer of your disk can use Photorec to dig up the data. And that's precisely what some connoisseurs of used disks have reported doing for fun - they're not interested in your data, they check this so they can make fun of how stoopid you are. "I found his email files"

To erase a Windows disk, you can (administrator command prompt)

diskpart list disks select disk 2 clean all # writes 0x00 over entire disk drive exit

On a large drive, that could take three hours. When the buyer runs Photorec, they won't find anything.

You can verify drive contents with a hex editor like this one. On a zeroed drive, you can quickly scroll through and check.

Paul

That will depend on your hardware (does it have AES instructions, does the drive handle encryption).

Yes.

It's an 'enterprisey' feature but I don't know whether it's standard on every SSD. It's pretty minimal overhead to do in the controller so I don't see why not.

However it's a slightly different use case to Bitlocker et al. Bitlocker protects user data, while drive encryption protects the drive. For example you might want to keep an unencrypted recovery partition so you can restore the machine if you forget the password - with drive encryption you can't do that unless it allows you to mark off that partition as unencrypted.

No, in the firmware a delete is a delete. It will be overwritten with zeroes, end of story. You might be able to dig out some faint traces with an electron microscope, but that's serious paranoia (and million dollar) time.

Drive encryption/Secure Erase is handled in the drive firmware, and I would be very surprised if the firmware was dumb enough not to take account of the wear levelling the firmware itself is doing.

Theo

Well, depends on your mail program, mine certainly doesn't create

No they don't. And I don't expect an application to have to do backup. I rely on Time Machine for that.

SH snipped-for-privacy@spam.com wrote

Not enough to matter with the stuff you don?t want anyone else to be able to see.

You don?t see it advertised with laptops either but very few don?t have it.

It isnt anything stored anywhere.

Not if you overwrite everything.

Bullshit it is, no one has mine.

I use mine as beer mats!

This suggests they could be aluminium:

Given these are written to by heads with relatively low currents, I would have thought a strong magnet pulled over the disc might be effective.

My first thought was heat, and most materials have a curie point. I then looked up cobalt alloy as used on platters and I see it has a curie temperature of 900C.

So likely aluminium.

Well done!

I've mentioned red heat twice already.

You didn't have to go that far.

Seagate and WDC made an announcement at one point, that drive level encryption would be implemented on *all* drives. This might account for the need to swap a certain ROM off the old controller board, when trying to use a new controller board. Something on the controller board, has to match the method used to write that set of platters. It requires soldering skills to move the component from old board to new, and assumes the component was not burned out during a failure.

This is a guess on my part, as to why a ROM swap is needed, as the controller chips had their own boot code inside and should not need external storage like that.

ROM swaps weren't always required, and this is a more recent development (maybe last ten years or so). On older disk drives, you could swap controllers willy-nilly.

There is Secure Erase and Enhanced Secure Erase.

The latter erases the SSD free pool as well.

On a HDD, Enhanced Secure Erase enables the write head for every last data sector on the drive, whether spares or not. It just wipes over the entire surface, hitting that password that got "spared out".

The only area which cannot be written is the servo wedges, and they only store the servo pattern, not data.

Paul

All you need to do is bend the thing, there is no way back from bent platters without serious expenditure.

When the drives were first used, FDE was not aavilable at the time.... :-)

Obviously not so much an issue now with more modern OS's.....