1. We are interested in What FREEWARE app/program the TechRep people use that wipe DRIVES? We know about Darik’s Boot and Nuke (“DBAN”) but are there others? We’ve seen Disk Wipe ($50) from Dti data recovery http://www.dtidata.com/tech_support.asp but wonder what other freeware is out there that will do this.
———————————————–
THIS IS RARELY DISCUSSED but we feel extremely important:
2. As IT Pros we see the biggest problem is dealing with drives that are physically (or mechanically) unusable. Our client’s concerns are that we return these drives to the various mfgs (IBM/Hitachi, Western Digital, etc.) and they want to MAKE SURE that their data won’t be able to be recovered. We tend to empathize with their
paranoia. These companies receive THOUSANDS of drives back for RMA. We can see a HUGE incentive in checking out some if not all [we know how much work this would be but hey, who really knows what apps these guys have for processing this stuff quickly?] the stuff people are putting in their drives. Perhaps there is a neat little agreement
with gov’t and these companies. Especially in this age of all this “terrorism” etc.
Problem is that degaussers can be expensive:
http://www.athana.com/ddequip/v91mHD.htm
We are wondering if you know whether a simple handheld degausser would be effective enough for this task:
http://www.athana.com/ddequip/v91mHD.htm
What we’ve found is most will tell you that it is totally inadequate for this job, in efforts to either make you buy the expensive ones designed for the task, or for plain ‘ole disinformation purposes. We don’t buy this answer. After all, we keep hearing about how important it is to keep the drives away from *ANY* magnetic sources and that you may lose your data (which is absolutlely true – we know from experience). And we wondered if even just extremely powerful magnets can do the trick. We recently received some that are so powerful, we almost have to keep them in the middle of the room to prevent them from stickin to something. They are almost impossible to get apart and when you stick ’em onto any metal, we better darn make sure we’ve got our fingers well out of the way!! Never seen anything like ’em.
We find it hard to believe that it would be less than a minor or major nightmare to recover data after you blast a drive with even a handheld degausser [see link above] or such strong magnets but wanted an unbiased and objective discussion on it. Of course we could experiment, but we’d really like to hear other comments on this.
We appreciate your help or any info you can help us with on this.
Thank you very much!!!!!!
