On Tue, 3 Sep 2013, "Noah O'Donoghue" <noah.odonoghue@gmail.com> wrote:
1. It's really fast, as its close to the metal. 2. If the wiping stops half way, due to power failure, when the drive next starts the wiping will continue, also if the drive has physical faults, the firmware will try to prevent read of the data even if it can't successfully wipe. 3. Presumably reallocated bad sectors are also wiped (not true with dd).
You are assuming that the wiping does what it claims to do. I would be more inclined to trust that when I've written 100G of data to a 100G disk then whatever was there before is really gone. Disk firmware is presumably at least as buggy as any other software and the wiping functionality probably wouldn't get much testing. For consumer levels of data protection dropping a drive from 1.5M on concrete after using dd would be a good option. Most people who try to steal data will be put off by a broken drive head assembly. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/