Harddrives

So I was beginning to ponder making a list of some of the cool but unknown websites I frequent, when I got distracted by the topic of harddrive destruction/wiping. I know most people just tune out to this sort of thing, but it's important - think Identity Theft. You throw away your computer, or sell it to someone, and somewhere on the drive is your social security number. Not good.

When I was in undergrad, a buddy of mine took a computer forensics class at BYU. Once a month, the professor would bring in a bunch of old hard drives and they'd have to put together a profile of the previous owner. Scary stuff.

One might think, "I deleted everything, I'm good, right?" Not necessarily. Here's a brief explanation of why not, complete with some neato drawings I made.

Computer harddrives are magnetic based, and record information basically as a One or a Zero. Like this:
When we delete something off our computer, we normally think the data completely erased, and gone back to the 'zero' level on the magnetic tape in the drive. But the truth is, it never gets completely back to zero. It's more like this:

Now, most people don't have the specialized software to recover data when it's in a partial state like this. Some people, like computer forensics guys, police departments, and the NSA can. Oh, and some crazy people too - maybe your neighbor that digs through your trash trying to steal stuff? I dunno.

So what to do about it? There are a couple schools of thought.

1) Wipe the disk. Here's a discussion on how to do it. Basically the fastest way to do this is to fill the drive with meaningless data. This can be random data, as mentioned in the article, or just fill the ENTIRE drive with '1's (not mentioned in the article). While deleting doesn't get the physical data back to 'Zero', when you record data it does become a '1' (or close enough).

2) Destroy the disk. Definitely more fun. There some fun videos on how to do this with extreme prejudice. Environmentalists probably say that this is a waste of resources and hurts mother earth. But it's your stuff, and its your identity.