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TIL the hard drive I'd been wiping with one pass since 2019 needed more, and a client's old tax files are why I know it
Used to just run a single overwrite pass on drives before resale and call it done, figured nobody was digging through that. Last month a client in Akron handed me a 2013 drive from a retired accountant and asked if I could pull anything off it, so I ran recovery software as a test and got a full year of scanned returns back after one pass. Turns out the old myth about needing 7 or 35 passes is dead wrong for modern drives, but one pass clearly isn't enough either, and now I do 3 passes and verify the whole disk before anything leaves my bench. Anyone else had a drive come back from the dead after a wipe, and what did you change after that?
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thomas_price3h ago
Three passes and a full verify for every drive leaving your bench sounds like a lot of time burned on a problem that barely exists. Who's actually pulling tax returns off a used drive they bought? The skill and gear to run recovery on an overwritten disk isn't something some random buyer at a flea market has, lol. Your accountant drive test is a cool story but it's one drive, and testing recovery right after you wipe is about the easiest case there is. If cold hard proof of a wiped drive got pulled by a real attacker is out there I'd love to see it, because right now this feels like a lot of worry over nothing.
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