Re: Securely erasing data
Shortly after Y2K when my organisation decommissioned its Vax systems, I observed that the secure paper disposal outfit were feeding an RL02 pack through their lorry-mounted shredder. It took a long time.
I have seen commercial hard drive shredders in action and they are stunning in the way that they munch a disk. An hour each way to drive to the facility and ten minutes for a mountain of drives to disappear. I also discussed the environmental and economic cost of shredding with the Eco person at a UK Tier Two PC supplier. The company's policy for re-using PCs was to scrap the disk owing to overall cost of a secure wipe. More recently, a multinational enterprise PC supplier quoted a £1 fee (never actually charged) to allow the owner to retain disks replaced following a service repair.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
