<div dir="ltr">Well, he was talking about the government. They're always ten or more years behind, so I'm willing to bet that their disk wiping procedures probably DO date back from when there were MFM drives. ;-)<br>
<br>J.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Monty J. Harder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mjharder@gmail.com">mjharder@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div dir="ltr"><div class="Ih2E3d"><br></div>I don't believe that dd writes to a disk buffer in RAM. Certainly, the drive itself may use a write buffer, but writing the entire disk would easily exhaust that buffer. I don't know why they would want thousands of passes though. They may have had a point back in the days of MFM hard drives, but encoding schemes have become very sophisticated. Modern hard drives must employ extensive error correction codes just to be able to read the last written contents of a sector reliably, I stand by my contention that alternating 0s and random junk for a total of a dozen passes should render the data completely inaccessible to anyone (with the possible exception of those spy agencies, and I'm not even sure about them).<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><br>"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine<br>
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