Secure data erasure

For all the trouble we have to take to protect, backup, and maintain our data, when we want to get rid of it, it turns out to be remarkably difficult.  Do we delete  Overwriting delete?  Overwrite 40 times?  Overwrite 40 times including all the slack space?  Degauss?  Get out the thermite?

This site presents a faster and easier option.  There is software, and also a paper (possibly self-serving ...) explaining the option, and why it is very often good enough.

Comments

[Peter L.]

How exactly does this set itself apart from tools like DBAN or just encrypting your HDD with TrueCrypt and a random key that you forget?
It's probably not the ease of use since you have to create a bootable disk (most users have no clue about this).
Time? Unknown, since there's no information about the algorithm used, only a vague reference to the ATA T13 committee.
Security? Doubtable. To quote Peter Gutmann "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected", and a disc encrypted with AES and Twofish will probably die from mechanical failure before it's brute-force decrypted.Portability? Most certainly not. The tool presented requires a MS-DOS compatible environment to run, which pretty much limits it to x86 compatible hardware, and by using ATA commands to clean the disk it limits itself even further. DBAN is currently being ported to Apples PowerPCs, and doesn't care if the disc is (S)ATA, SAS/SCSI, or something else.

[Cd-MaN]

Hello.

I too was enthusiastic about this technology when I first heard about it: http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2009/03/secure-erase.html

However a commenter, who seemed very knowledgeable, pointed out several drawbacks, which you can read about in the comments sections of the above blogpost.

Regards.