On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 5:46 AM, Man-wai Chang changmw@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks. But do you need a special tool if you used /dev/random as input to the dd command?
How many passes do you make? Do you ensure you flip each bit on and then off? What about the spare space automatically allocated by the drive and then hidden from view? What about bad sectors?
Like encryption, it's often better not to DIY.
Paranoia is a bottomless pit. If you just want to scrub old accounting files, I'm sure your technique works fine. (As does one of my clients who takes his old HDDs to the shooting range for target practice.)
But for the lazy amongst us, issuing the scrub command with appropriate settings can get your disk scrubbed to DOD standards or better.
I often take apart the drive afterwards to salvage the supermagnets (hint: a compass helps locate them).