incrediBILL - 1:56 am on May 9, 2009 (gmt 0)

I agree with you, 100% destruction is best.

However, I used to work in HDD labs and the hardware is nothing like it used to be.

Back in the old days platters were made of different alloys which expanded and shrank during start up and cool off, as the drive warmed up, tracks shifted, etc. which meant the media had data written outside of it's intended threshold making recovery often as easy as slightly offsetting the read head on a reformatted drive.

Basically, much of the physics that made erased data recoverable also caused HDD failures as tracks were written slightly out of synch, which ultimately caused track failure, yada yada, better alloys, less overwrite.

Additionally, older write heads were much larger and used more power and carved a bigger path thru the media (trust me, spent lots of time with read/write heads and oscilloscopes looking at the "ghost" data) which was a problem that had to be eliminated in order to increase track density to increase overall drive density.

Today the materials don't have those same physics issues which allowed track density to increase and vertical data writing, which is all so precise that a low level format is actually pretty good at eliminating all traces withing reasonable limits these days.

Then toss it in a smelter, done. ;)

[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:58 am (utc) on May 9, 2009]