Smashing and Destroying the Hard Drive
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Is the only way to protect old hard drives the smash and destroy method? That is what one computer publication is advocating:
“The only way to stop fraudsters stealing information from old computer hard drives is by destroying them completely, a study has found.
Computing magazine Which? recovered 22,000 “deleted” files from eight computers purchased on eBay.”
link: Hard drive destruction ‘crucial’
There are many security programs online which ‘overwrite’ the data drive so many times that the claim is that the files are un-retrievable. The smash and destroy method is certainly a conclusive method. It just seems such a waste of useful hardware. Has this now become the preferred security precaution with old hard drives?
Catherine Forsythe
One Comment
davidm
January 8th, 2009
at 8:38am
If you use RAID 5 or other similar striped / parity schemes, any one drive cannot yield private data.