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Nwipe vs HDD physical destruction (hackertalks.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have a bunch of hard disks that have come to the end of their useful life, I was thinking about physically destroying them, but that seems like a lot of work.

https://github.com/martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe

Nwipe and shreados are very popular. What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of nwipe?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Seems perfectly alright. I think for HDDs, consensus is you overwrite everything and you're fine. If you want to make absolutely sure you can do multiple passes, like 2 or 3 with different (random) data should suffice. There are a lot of myths around though, concerning wiping data.

I generally use the common, established linux utilities: 'wipe' or 'shred' or just 'dd' on the whole device. The Arch Wiki has a long article on Securely wipe disk. I guess nwipe is fine, too.

Terms and conditions apply if you're using flash memory or SSDs. Overwriting them is not 100% effective. But for plain harddisks it is.