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As Dr. Gutmann points out in an epilogue to his seminal 1996 paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" ( http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html ) there's never a need today to do the time-consuming 35-pass "Gutmann" erasing algorithm. It was designed to be a general purpose erasing algorithm that sequentially used all the best erasing patterns for disk recording technologies such as MFM and forms of RLL that haven't been used for at least a decade.

According to Dr. Gutmann's epilogue, "For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do."