Why do governments and paranoid people physically destroy out of use hard drives? Can't a bit only be a one or a zero...

Why do governments and paranoid people physically destroy out of use hard drives? Can't a bit only be a one or a zero? If you write every bit as a zero or one no one has any ability to recover the data right?

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What the fuck is wrong you with

hard drives are cheap
protecting your national security is not

(OP)
>If you write every bit as a zero or one no one has any ability to recover the data right?
In almost all cases, yes. That said, there have been exceptions - mostly done by big corporations as proof of concept reconstruction efforts. Gutmann once suggested, correctly, that a bit had "memory" and any former state(s) it had could be more or less reliably determined. This was one of the big pushes for multiple write zero passes. As the technology has moved forward, this has become much less relevant. A single pass of zeros on a modern drive is enough to thwart all but the most expensive and experimental data recovery.

The first question is whether or not you are a person of interest that would have the attention of a person/entity capable of throwing the outlandish amounts of time, money, hardware, and manpower at your discarded drive to reconstruct its contents. (Are you this sort of person? Almost certainly not.) The next question would be whether or not that reconstruction resulted in encrypted data. (You do encrypt your data, right?)

tl;dr Yeah, single pass is fine. Destroying a drive is the purvey of roleplaying kids on Sup Forums who are so far into their fantasies that they think the gubmint is dumpster diving them to steal their old drives.

I want to fuck that frog

>tl;dr Yeah, single pass is fine.

t. NSA

>da globbermonts is coming for me!
Quick, buy a tent and head for the woods! Leave a trail of destroyed drives leading in the opposite direction to distract them!

I remember a long time ago, just as a 'look what we can do' kind of thing, they took data, overwrote the hdd so many times you think the driver would have failed from that alone, then fully recovered nearly all the data in a bootable manor.

the only way to ensure data is destroyed is a massive fuck off industrial electromagnet, this is what hdd companies do on rma drives they get apparently, may not be perfect but it will fuck the drives enough that any employe isn't going to be willing to pay the 1000-5000$ to recover data that may not be valuable, or physical destruction with acid.

personally If you wanted to completely destroy a drive a ssd would be an easier thing to do it with.

Not him, but literally no reason not to use multiple passes.

Then there's literally no reason to not just destroy the plate afterwards. Neither one actually provides you any extra practical measure of security, but if your autism demands it you might as well.

Standard method is to use 3 passes which has been implemented by the DoD and is mil std now. It's to mitigate the risk of any data at all possibly being leveraged.

We're talking about systems that even a little bit of information could be damning used by an adversary advanced enough to spend thousands of man hours on recovering a drive because Steve only did 1 pass.

>We're talking about systems that even a little bit of information could be damning used by an adversary advanced enough to spend thousands of man hours on recovering a drive because Steve only did 1 pass.
This was exactly my point in my first post. This case applies to almost no one, and literally no one currently on Sup Forums.

Again, anything more is unjustified paranoia, hacker fantasies, and autism. That said, you might as well say fuck it and go full NSA on your drives if you're that worried about it.

nsa.gov/resources/everyone/media-destruction/assets/files/epl-hard-drive-destruction-devices.pdf

But how else are we going to get thermite montages from defcon?

How do you know somebody won't recover personal info from your HDD in 5-10 years? Only using one pass is silly when it's no extra effort to get peace of mind with the recommended 3-pass wipe.

What value can they possibly get from 5-10 year old data? Besides, even if they did have the mountain of resources necessary to reconstruct the drive, the data would all be encrypted anyway.

Army here.

We use a hammer at my current unit.

Last place I was at brought them to a really intense grinder.

You cant always overwrite an old hard drive.

But with proper encryption you dont have to destroy an our of use hard drive.

*out of use
But your password has to be long enough.

Write drive full 1-2 times: 3-4 hours depending on the drive
Drill a hole to the drive: 2 second

Why is every girl in Boku no Hero Academia so THICCCCCC

Fucking SHIT they're THICC AS A BRICC

GOD DAMNNNN

>skinny teenager
>THICCCCCCC
what did he mean by this?

>SAYING FROPPY IS SKINNY

>fanart

>Not him, but literally no reason not to use multiple passes.

Uhh time

It's way faster to do 1 pass