TOT OT Giving away a good all in one PC

[Mark Allread]

Sorry to hear that - hope she improves soon.

[Theo]

Because technology has moved on since 1990s.

Good luck filling that 8TB drive with zeroes seven times. See you next month.

Theo

[tabbypurr]

No, none of the above. The idea of multiple writes was based on bs that never added up. That has after many years become better known.

There is that :)

NT

[Johnny B Good]

====snip====

When I read that, I was prompted to disclose only that it was a "memorable day" by way of an obligation to the fact of it being my 37th wedding anniversary.

Thus far, it seems to be going quite well since I appear to have avoided stepping on the 'Land Mines' that have, in times past, triggered the usual round of arguments and recriminations that so often mark this day of celebration.

And, yes, I can almost hear the thoughts of those veteran husbands now thinking "The Poor Fool! The day's not yet over and he's already counting his chickens. Has 37 years of marriage taught him nothing?".

In my defence, all I can say is that I still have some optimism in how the rest of today is going to pan out. :-)

[Johnny B Good]

At least as far as post millenium PMRL and NPML based drives are concerned. A single pass overwrite operation using *any* form of data pattern is more than sufficient to render the previously stored data totally and utterly irretrievable. :-)

SSD technology otoh, is a different kettle of fish when it comes to erasure of data. It is true that the standard block erase does the job sufficiently well but a classic zeroing operation as used to sanitise HDDs won't deal with the wear levelling spare blocks and those marked as 'expired'. However, in the case of SSDs, the ATA Secure Erase command is meant to include every single erase block regardless of state (working, wear levelling pool and retired blocks) so ought to solve the sanitisation problem (and swiftly!) assuming the SSD manufacturer has properly implemented this feature.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I met an MP once at a country fair. "there is a joke in the house. And old member about to retire says to a young member: 'You know, in my time I can say that 90% of what we do here is almost completely pointless'. The young MP piped up 'well at least that leaves 10%' 'Yes', he replied '10% is completely and utterly pointless'".

:-0)

[Andrew Gabriel]

It wasn't pointless on what would now be considered very low density disks, but cost of recovering track edges from current high density media would make it unviable (and probably impossible).

Well, two passes - once with disk in its final state in the system, and then again having cleared the grown defect list so you also clear the replaced blocks.

[Brian Gaff]

You would need to be more specific on what os it has. I'm sure most blind associations might be able to find it a home if its reasonably fast. add nvda to it and wallah. Brian