Sat, 17 Jun 2006

A New Technique to Quickly Erase Hard Drives

Good old permanent magnets, albeit of a new design, were what finally did the trick. Fascinating stuff, especially that crushed drives could be reconstructed for data. Somebody's got a lot more patience than I do, that's for sure!

Stories about 'wiped' hard drives appearing on eBay (and other channels) and being stuffed with personably-identifiable data are legion; rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself). Dark Reading reports the development of a technique to securely wipe a hard drive in seconds, and which is safe for flying. (The safe for flying criterion rules out things like fun with packing the drives in thermite. Also thermiting the drives may not erase the platters to the standard required, which is moderately interesting itself.

(link) [Slashdot]

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