[svlug] Erasing old hard drives

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):

> Does anyone know of a tool that I can use to wipe out a hard drive to
> ensure data cannot be recovered from it? 

If you want the data to be not recoverable even by the Russian FSB 
(ex-KGB), follow the guidelines used at Lawrence Livermore:  Melt the
drive's platters into slag.  Back when I was helping build a large Linux 
compute cluster for the Lab, if one of the nodes needed a rework during
acceptance certification, we the vendor could get back every part of the
computer for diagnosis _except_ the hard drive.

A place I work with 'barbecues' hard drives being disposed of with a
very powerful bulk demagnetiser, which might not defeat the FSB but 
is good enough.  Unfortunately, that treatment also massively bends the
platters, making the drive every bit as unusable as if it had been
melted into slag.

That place is willing to run drives being retired through DBAN (the
aforementioned Darik's Boot and Nuke) if someone wishes to adopt the
drive rather than barbecuing it.