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Old 02-18-2014, 09:43 PM   #16
gotfw
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Nobody mentioned booting to a live cd and using "shred" here? Spend a couple days repeatedly writing random bits from /dev/urandom and then following with a final pass of zero's (so as to "cloak" the random passes a bit)?

I'm far from guru on this stuff but thought that should be pretty good. If not, please clue me in.
 
Old 02-28-2014, 02:22 PM   #17
salasi
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Sorry about the delay in re-opening this thread, but a couple of points:

Quote:
Originally Posted by gotfw View Post
Nobody mentioned booting to a live cd and using "shred" here?
Well, I did mention the live CD approach back in post #6.

Quote:
Originally Posted by gotfw View Post
Spend a couple days repeatedly writing random bits from /dev/urandom and then following with a final pass of zero's (so as to "cloak" the random passes a bit)?
My only comment on that is that random is a bit inefficient. If you want to guarantee that every bit is overwritten by its complement (and that may not be an accurate description of the ideal thing to want, but it doesn't seem an completely unreasonable approach to setting a standard), how many passes of 'random' do you have to perform? (Well, an infinite number, but that's obviously too high a bar to set.) Up to the point that this is a useful requirement to set, you have to feel that it is more easily achieved with passes of zeroes and ones. If you aren't bothered about the time it takes, this may not be a factor that concerns you.

Also, in the past week, I had chance to talk to people from DiskShred, who mechanically reduce disk drives to rubble. Now, I understand that this specific organisation is unlikely to be any use to you, and I am not recommending them over any other organisation with similar capabilities, but I just want to comment that their services are reasonably priced if you have a decent number of disks to go at. Otherwise, the price for a site visit does tend to make the price per disk a bit on the high side.

The environmental aspects of reducing a disk to rubble are probably a bit irritating (that is, eliminating recycling, which seems undesirable, in general), but if it really was a high security project, and my job was on the line if it went wrong, I think that I'd want the mechanical destruction, at least as part of the process.
 
  


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