Quote:
Originally Posted by Matth
Gutman was designed for another era, when drives were not stretching the media capacity to the limit. One overwrite pass will defeat anything except what the security services may have.
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"Gutmann", in all 35 passes was never needed. It's a collection of wipe patterns all targeted to different drive encoding methods. If you know the method used, you only need to run the pattern for that drive.
The paper Gutmann wrote as well theorising recovery from overwrite data was also based entirely on theory and had no basis on what is, or was ever actually possible.
There hasn't been any recorded evidence of any data been recovered from an overwrote drive, and the whole "the heads don't track perfectly" thing where it MAY be possible to recover what the previous write was would require manual per bit recovery, and just isn't really at all feasible.
Even the security services can't recover from one a one pass wipe.
Still, I've worked for many companies that have to dispose of drives, and the favoured method of most of them is shredding.
It's fast and worry free, you see the drives go in, you see the ground up drives come out. It's a lot faster than having to bother with wipes.