IT Employment

I use a little utility called Killdisk. There's a free version that allows you one pass, and a pay version that allows up to 99 passes. It's run from a bootable floppy. It writes all bits to 0 or 1. Nothing leaves my shop without at least 2 passes. Three passes is supposed to be DOD compliant.

If I'm feeling extra paranoid, I bring them to our machine shop to bend them or drill through them.

I've heard the NRA uses theirs on the target range.

Darik's Boot And Nuke, a free download, can do a variety of overwrites including the Dept of Defense method and a lot more. In my tests, 1 pass of pseudorandom data is sufficent to destroy the data to the point that any commonly available forensics program cannot retrieve it. Just search on DBAN.

If you are paranoid or don't need the disks or tapes anymore, physically destroy them with a sledge hammer. This is also a good method when the drive has crashed and I can't do a software overwrite.

I'd start with a good tool to format then run the disk over an electromagenet. That should do ya!

sometimes I take them apart and let my kids decorate the disk and make stuff.
The magnets inside are good for magnetizing screwdriver tips if you do much work on portables.

I had a bunch of old scsi drives from our old as400- i did not want to take the time to run the fbi's eraser program (takes about 8 hours per pass and requires 3 passes) so i took them and all of our old bad drives and went traget practicing- i can guarantee no one will can data off these drives which was my only criteria. (and hey it was fun)

If you have EXTREMELY sensitive data and want the HD destroyed try get the actual disk out of it's case and melt it with a plasma cutter.