speeding up hard drive wipe

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 26 Sep 2020 at 21:09, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:

>  I know quite a bit about how hard drives work, what DSPs can
> do with incomplete data, etc., etc., and while I don't think it's
> entirely infeasible, I am yet to see *proof* that anyone has actually
> gone and done this.  And until it's supplied, I'm firmly in the
> skeptical column.

Ken, I have toured a data-recovery lab. I have seen for myself what they can do.

The one I visited was Dr Solomon's, about 25y ago. The one they were
proudest of: an office was burgled. The raiders took all the
computers. The workstations were sold off. The big tower server was
considered too outré -- weird OS and stuff -- so it was thrown from
the back of a moving truck on a motorway. (British for "freeway".) It
bounced, was smashed to bits, then the bits were run over.

The police and the client manage to find all the platters of the hard
disks, some buried in soil in a nearby field. The platters were taken
to Dr Solomon's, who cleaned the mud off, matched them to drives,
assembled them on hand-made spindles with hand-made
manually-controlled heads... And got 80-90% of the customer's data
back and saved the business.

A thorough format is _more_ effective than smashing the disk to bits
with a hammer.

I've sent customers to them for circa US$10,000 recovery jobs to get
back a few gigs of stuff, and they've paid, and it worked.

But there are abundant citations:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/how-to/a8566/how-to-read-a-smashed-hard-drive-14877558/

I could introduce you to a former member of staff at this place:
https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/data-recovery/hard-drive

But once the tracks are overwritten, on a modern drive? It's gone.


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