I'm using DBAN quite a lot and usually just autonuke everything, but this takes hours at times and I was wondering what the actual differences between the other methods of DBAN, I need something unrecoverably detroys data but to be a bit quicker than the autonuke if possible.
Cheers,
Russ
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'Fraid to tell you this, but the only way faster would be to open up the drive, rip out the platters, and take a grinder to them. (Of course, that tends to void the warranty. C'est la vie.)
You COULD have it do just a single pass of writing all hex zeros (0x00) or all hex ones (0xFF) to the drive. If all you're doing is clearing out the hard disk so you can put it in another PC for someone else at work, that might be sufficient. If you're clearing out corporate data prior to sending this to a computer recycling/reseller, then it's not. If you're trying to make sure that all the data is securely overwritten and unrecoverable, each bit on that disk has to be written to several times. The only way to speed this up (possibly) is to put the drive in a faster PC, but even that might not help much.
Good luck,
Jim Carroll
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There's only two situations when a single overwrite with 0s is not sufficient:
a) You're working to someone else's specification. They don't specify multiple writes because there's any proof that a single write is recoverable, but because there isn't any proof that it isn't recoverable -- apart from the fact that no-one has (publicly) done it yet. I'd have thought that any one of the numerous data recovery companies would be offering to recover overwritten data, but none do so.
b) You're using archaic, obsolete, hardware. Any data on a drive built in the last 15 years will be unrecoverable if over written once.
Multiple overwrites isn't harmful, but it doesn't do anything that a single overwrite can't do.
I welcome any links to any company that offers to restore data from a disk that's had a single overwrite, or any links to papers showing a method that'd work on a modern (eg, not MFM) drive.
Kind Regards,
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Hi,
I'm using DBAN quite a lot and usually just autonuke everything, but this takes hours at times and I was wondering what the actual differences between the other methods of DBAN, I need something unrecoverably detroys data but to be a bit quicker than the autonuke if possible.
Cheers,
Russ
'Fraid to tell you this, but the only way faster would be to open up the drive, rip out the platters, and take a grinder to them. (Of course, that tends to void the warranty. C'est la vie.)
You COULD have it do just a single pass of writing all hex zeros (0x00) or all hex ones (0xFF) to the drive. If all you're doing is clearing out the hard disk so you can put it in another PC for someone else at work, that might be sufficient. If you're clearing out corporate data prior to sending this to a computer recycling/reseller, then it's not. If you're trying to make sure that all the data is securely overwritten and unrecoverable, each bit on that disk has to be written to several times. The only way to speed this up (possibly) is to put the drive in a faster PC, but even that might not help much.
Good luck,
Jim Carroll
There's only two situations when a single overwrite with 0s is not sufficient:
a) You're working to someone else's specification. They don't specify multiple writes because there's any proof that a single write is recoverable, but because there isn't any proof that it isn't recoverable -- apart from the fact that no-one has (publicly) done it yet. I'd have thought that any one of the numerous data recovery companies would be offering to recover overwritten data, but none do so.
b) You're using archaic, obsolete, hardware. Any data on a drive built in the last 15 years will be unrecoverable if over written once.
Multiple overwrites isn't harmful, but it doesn't do anything that a single overwrite can't do.
I welcome any links to any company that offers to restore data from a disk that's had a single overwrite, or any links to papers showing a method that'd work on a modern (eg, not MFM) drive.
Kind Regards,