I’m discussing this comment :

https://sopuli.xyz/comment/13141026

the one that you initially replied to talking about recent Spanish court case where the defendants used a 7x wipe on some drives that were required to be retained as evidence.

Im well aware sysadmins existed before 2006, and also don’t see how that’s relevant in context. Security practices change over the course of 18 years in IT, as they have for secure wiping data.

DoD dropped it 7 and 3 pass requirements in 2006.

Later in 2006, the DoD 5220.22-M operating manual removed text mentioning any recommended overwriting method. Instead, it delegated that decision to government oversight agencies (CSAs, or Cognizant Security Agencies), allowing those agencies to determine best practices for data sanitization in most cases.

Meanwhile, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in its Guidelines for Media Sanitization of 2006 (PDF), stated that “for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media.” When NIST revised its guidelines in late 2014, it reaffirmed that stance. NIST 800-88, Rev. 1 (PDF) states, “For storage devices containing magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as binary zeros typically hinders recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data.” (It noted, however, that hidden areas of the drive should also be addressed.)

For ATA hard disk drives and SCSI hard disk drives specifically, NIST states, “The Clear pattern should be at least a single write pass with a fixed data value, such as all zeros. Multiple write passes or more complex values may optionally be used.”

My org shreds discs entirely with a mechanical grinder, so I’m well aware of overkill.

Multiple overwrites being unnecessary isnt really an opinion. Here is the company that owns dban agreeing with security orgs like NIST, that anything past 1 write is unnecessary. .

I think the issue comes down to whether the org in question does that 7 passes consistently on all discs, or if it just so happened to start that policy with those that had evidence on them.

Dont forget the time barrier. India is 12hrs apart from PST. You submit an issue and dont hear a response for a whole day. Things that used to take minutes or hours take days or weeks instead, even for simple problems.

It’s an option, but not the default. It takes forever to run, so someone using it is being very intentional.

It’s also considered wildly overkill, especially with modern drives and their data density. Even a single pass of zeros, the fastest and default dban option, wipe data at a level that you would need a nation state actor to even try to recover data.

I know the correct pronunciation, but it will always be ware-ez to me.

The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.

For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.

So an equivalent in solar power generation/storage vs nuclear is about 7x faster and 1/8th the cost than nuclear.