What Are the Standards for Media Destruction? Some common terms are disk wiping and secure deletion. Different terms may be used to refer to disk or file erasure. Even if the drive is to be reused it should be erased using one of the recommended tools or applications. Hard drives returned to vendors as defective are frequently repaired and returned to service with data intact.ĭisposed functional hard drives are a valuable commodity and present significant risk of data disclosure if not properly treated.ĭrives that will not be reused should be physically destroyed. (See Dispose of Old Computers and Devices or Physically Destroy Old Computers and Devices.) Some ways data may be disclosed are:Ĭomputers that are disposed of or sold without appropriate media destruction practices.
But keep in mind that there are several possible factors can affect the speed of the erase, your results may be different than mine.Media destruction, either physical or electronic, is intended to prevent data disclosure. These results should help you determine how long it will take to securely erase your drive. If you perform a 35-pass erase (which is overkill for even the most important security purposes), it will take 78.5 minutes x 35 passes, which equals 2,747.5 minutes, or 45 hours and 47 minutes.
So if you have a 250 GB drive, and perform a single pass erase, it should take roughly 78.5 minutes to complete. Therefore, each pass takes 0.314 minutes per gigabyte. Dividing the number of minutes by the number of gigabytes that were erased results in 0.314 minutes per gigabyte. Therefore, the 7-pass erase on the 500 gigabyte drive took 18 hours and 22 minutes (1102 total minutes).īased on the overall time, each pass took about 2 hours and 37 minutes (157 total minutes). Since the actual formatting of the drive takes less than a minute with Apple's Disk Utility, the disk formatting time is negligible. I began the secure erase at 12:13 AM and the process completed at 6:35 PM the same day. I performed a 7-pass erase on a Western Digital My Book Studio 500GB drive, connected via Firewire 800, using Apple's Disk Utility.
The overall time may also be affected by the speed of the hard drive, the software program you use, and possibly the computer's processor speed. Because the software erases every bit on the drive, the amount of time each erase will take is directly proportional to the hard drive's size. The amount of time a 7-pass erase will take depends mostly on the size of your hard drive. Some offer 3 or 5-pass erase options, while some, including Apple's Disk Utility allow you to perform up to a 35-pass erase.
Apple's Disk Utility programs, as well as other hard disk utilities offer this option. It overwrites the data seven times, making it impossible to recover any usable data from the drive. Answer: A 7-pass erase is a secure way of erasing the data on a hard disk.
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