Just as a lark, my SO took an old HDD and used it to test recovery systems. He low level formatted and overwrote and erased and reformatted from FAT 32 to NTFS and back, and just generally did all the neat stuff everybody tells you to do to make data unrecoverable, then ran a recover. He was able to repeat the erase/recovery process ten times, recovering anywhere from 85-99% of the original data after every pass.
He then got tired of the exercise and gave up.
If you really don’t want anyone to find your data on a used HDD, I strongly recommend the following methods:
Use it for repeated shotgun target practices.
Douse it in gasoline and light it on fire.
Go play catch with the great big electromagnet at the car crusher place, then leave it in a Toyota as it goes through the crusher.
After any of the above methods (except for the car crusher one) it’s best to pound the thing with a sledgehammer until it’s very flat, then fold it over and crimp it flat again–just to be sure.
If you had kiddie porn on the drive, I’d also recommend dumping it out to sea in international waters…
I’m not really very far into hyperbole here, y’know… :eek: