10 Mar
2011
10 Mar
'11
6 a.m.
I wrote:
That's why the "secure erase" commands
were added to the ATA
command set, and the drive is supposed to erase even the spared blocks.
vintagecoder wrote:
I don't trust that to work.
Notice that I *never* said that you should trust the "secure erase"
command. I only said that this was why the command was invented.
But I do trust my vice grips.
If I thought a TLA was going to try to extract my data from a drive, I
wouldn't believe that breaking it into a few pieces with vice grips
would be sufficent to prevent it.
If I just wanted to prevent some random person from recovering my credit
card number from an old drive I was throwing away, I'd expect the
"secure erase" command to be sufficient to thwart that.
"If we guard our toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, we will lose
fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds."
-- former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy
In other words, balance the amount of time/money/effort you put into
erasing your old data with the cost (time/money/damage to reputation) of
unauthorized disclosure. If the drive contained your old grocery lists,
you don't need to use thermite on it, but if it contained sensitive
personal records of thousands of clients, you might not want to trust a
disk wipe program.
Eric