Re: Esther Rantzen: Fear of paedophiles is harming children


"Cynic" <cynic_999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fpque4hb1fcse1vugvu6m4b5jcl74bi9kc@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:20:40 GMT, Svenne <tvaerskaegg@xxxxxxx> wrote:

My internal HDD is 160 gig and external is 250 gig. When reinstalling
Windows I put the internal on disk wipe, which takes a minute or so
and then go and have a cup of coffee. When I get back it's wiped. I
never wipe my external drive because I only use it for backups of
documents, streamed media and suchlike that I want to save.

Wiping a HDD consists of writing to every single byte on every sector
of the disk. To wipe a 160GB HDD will therefore require writing at
least 160GB of data to the disk. It is most unlikely that your PC
will achieve a sustained average transfer rate of as much as 100MB/s -
a more common transfer rate is around the 70MB/s mark for internal
drives.

Wiping a 160GB internal HDD will take *at least* half an hour unless
you have exceptional hardware. Wiping a 250GB external USB drive will
be an overnight job.

Not enough. Forensic techniques are able to detect sufficient magnetic
remnants of previously written material for files to be reconstructed even
after the drive has been overwritten several times. Software that claims to
provide government agency (e.g. US Department of Defence or NSA) standard
wipes is misleading - and these agencies' only acceptable method of
completely sanitising a hard drive is by physically destroying the drive
platters, using a method such as degaussing.

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/government/MDG/NSA_CSS_Storage_Device_Declassification_Manual.pdf

If you wish I can provide a more technical explanation, but I feel that this
suffices for now.

Marcus


.

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