[ale] [OT] Mojave Experiment

[lists at serioustechnology.com (Geoffrey Myers)]

On Jul 31, 2008, at 10:06 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:

> try a belt sander on the platters. By the time that data stream is  
> reassembled, our sun will be a red giant.
>
> Realistically, a 1T+ alternating magnetic field (60Hz) for 5 seconds  
> with the drive not stationary in the field will render it useless to  
> even the most sophisticated STM/AFM methods. This will also render  
> the heads useless as well.
>
> A hand-held bulk tape erasure moving across the top cover of a drive  
> for about 30 seconds will render the contents unrecoverable to  
> "normal" people. Most 3-letter named organizations can pull data off  
> from this. This will not destroy the drives ability to be used again  
> like the above method.

Well I guess it really depends on who you're trying to protect your  
data from.  I would suspect that 10-20 overwrites of random data would  
be sufficient for all except the three letter government  
organizations.  Oh, wait, that's likely who most folks are worried  
about. ;)