cthulhuiscool
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2006
- Messages
- 3,002
Digging around on google is turning up conflicting results, so I wanted to pick your guys minds. Basically, I'm curious of reasonable ways to securely erase drives so that if I were to say sell or give away such drive, I don't have to worry about some clever fella digging up financial details or evidence of my shameful camgirl days (I was young and needed the disappointment of my parents )
I know platter drives are notoriously bad about retaining traces of past data, but see there are various wiping programs like DBAN or the options built into CCleaner. How secure are these methods, and is there a "good enough" number of passes or type of wiping? Also if I've had it password encrypted with bitlocker, is it really a concern (assuming they don't know my password)? The most secure one I see looks like it takes a million years to complete and is probably overkill unless you're on the run from the ABC Glowies, which isn't a concern for me... yet...
Then regarding SSD's, seeing mixed things. A lot of sources say that running a "trim" function on a compatible drive should scrub its past beyond recovery, but I've also heard from others they're fairly insecure. Who's telling the truth?
Appreciate any input.
I know platter drives are notoriously bad about retaining traces of past data, but see there are various wiping programs like DBAN or the options built into CCleaner. How secure are these methods, and is there a "good enough" number of passes or type of wiping? Also if I've had it password encrypted with bitlocker, is it really a concern (assuming they don't know my password)? The most secure one I see looks like it takes a million years to complete and is probably overkill unless you're on the run from the ABC Glowies, which isn't a concern for me... yet...
Then regarding SSD's, seeing mixed things. A lot of sources say that running a "trim" function on a compatible drive should scrub its past beyond recovery, but I've also heard from others they're fairly insecure. Who's telling the truth?
Appreciate any input.