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Back in the mainframe days - not so far away, a little over 20 years ago - MSU was active in a group called SHARE. It turns out a member of SHARE was the CIA. SHARE had installation codes. Michigan State was MSU - makes sense. The CIA code was CAD - for Cloak and Dagger (true story). The CIA's protocol was to smash hard drives with sledge hammers and then pulverize them. Obviously today's thumb drives have 1000 times more data than a 1980s mainframe disk drive - but physical destruction rules. /rich On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 5:05 PM, STeve Andre' <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > That was true years ago, with far smaller disks. I have read the data > from the control electronics, and you cannot get consistently readable > data from 1G+ disks. The old tricks of using nickel power in naphtha > and so on for the disks of olden days, where you could get data no > longer work. > > Writing three times on modern disks has a feel-good factor. The > dod 5220.22 (dash M?) states specific things to do to erase a disk, but > I know of no disk people today who say you need to do that. > > Disk technology has utterly changed in the last 15 years but the regs > for wiping them haven't. > > You are right that physical destruction is best! They make for great > targets, too. > > --STeve Andre' > > > > On 07/19/13 11:17, Isaac, Jeremy wrote: > > A zero fill isn't enough if you have access to the circuit board of the > hard drive and can read the analog signals from the heads. Darik's Boot > And Nuke (DBAN) defaults to three random write passes and one zero fill, > which is plenty. I've used it on a PowerEdge 2550, 2650, and 2850 with > success, so it should work on just about anything except any SPARC or POWER > servers. > > To get roughly the same thing out of dd, you could set if=/dev/urandom, > run it three times and then set if=/dev/zero. It's not the same quality of > randomness, but by then, the drive is certainly nuked. A metal shredder is > way faster, though. > > ------------------------------ > *From:* STeve Andre' [[log in to unmask]] > *Sent:* Wednesday, July 17, 2013 6:47 PM > *To:* [log in to unmask] > *Subject:* Re: [MSUNAG] Proper Disposal of old Server hard Drives? > > On 07/17/13 10:37, Al Puzzuoli wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > I understand that when old computers and servers go to salvage, the drives > in those computers are wiped, but what about free floating drives? We have > several old drives that were formerly part of an array. If we pass those > onto salvage, will they be disposed of securely? > > Thanks, > > > > Al Puzzuoli > > Michigan State University > > Information Technologist > http://www.rcpd.msu.edu > > Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities 517-884-1915 120 Bessey > Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1033 > > > > Why don't you hook them up to any kind of unix like system and do > something like > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0c bs=64k (OpenBSD example) > > to be sure? > > --STeve Andre' > > >