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A comment on What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder?. Parent comment

Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by hqsolomo on Thursday August 10, 2023 @05:30PM (#37082054)
Is there a way to reliably scrub the drives to make sure they're reusable? I know storage is cheap but it's destroying the drive really the only way to ensure data integrity?

I'm a big fan of recycling old electronics wherever possible. Would the cost of compute to virtually destroy the data on the drive so it can be safely reused as storage exceed the cost of physically destroying the drive and then recycling the raw materials?

I know for some cases true destruction is the best way to mitigate data theft in this case but... That's a bit heavy handed for an 80% use case, innit?

Edit: personally I always check what's on my old drives before decomming them but I think I'm an outlier here

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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by bozhark on Thursday August 10, 2023 @06:45PM (#37082674)
Nuke it.

8 times rewrite.

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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by hqsolomo on Thursday August 10, 2023 @07:46PM (#37083207)
"She's dead, Jim." No kill like overkill!
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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by arp242 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @07:29PM (#37083076)
Just overwriting once with all zeroes (or anything else) is enough; for modern drives (where “modern” means “last 25 years”). It’s basically impossible to recover data after that.
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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by hqsolomo on Thursday August 10, 2023 @07:45PM (#37083195)
That's what I figured- I've never actually tested it though because I don't have any spare drives sitting around anymore.

One of these days though I'll get around to zeroing out a drive and then running Autopsy on it for shiggles just to see what comes back up. Should be a fun experience!

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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by WalterBright on Thursday August 10, 2023 @11:55PM (#37084946)
> or anything else

I recommend overwriting with an endless loop of the freeway scene from "Solaris".

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Re:What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? by red-iron-pine on Friday August 11, 2023 @09:03AM (#37088230)
i would have gone with meatspin or ytmnd but to each their own
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