Ask Slashdot: Datacenter HDD Wipe Policy? 116
New submitter socheres (1771002) writes I keep a Slackware server hosted at various datacenters on leased hardware for personal / freelance business use. I have been doing this for the last 10 years and during this time I moved my stuff to several datacenters, some small and some big name companies. No matter the hosting company, since I choose to install my own OS and not take a pre-installed machine, I always got the hardware delivered with the previous guys' data stored on the hard drives. It was also the case with spare drives, which were not installed new if I did not ask specifically for new ones. Has this happened to you? How often?
Re:Physical destruction (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a stupid policy, if you've been in IT infrastructure for years, you should have a basic understanding of how to wipe a hard disk properly, it's a waste of money, it's creating environmental waste in disposing of it, it's wasting resources needing to purchase another one.
When you start talking about tens or hundreds or even thousands of disks, you're pissing away good money, because you're either too lazy or too stupid to know how to wipe a disk.
I've seen far too much of this idiocy over the past decade or so. ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org] ) it needs to stop. Learn how to wipe a disk, if it's not faulty, re-use the thing. That old post from 2011 is even more applicable to server drives which are not even remotely cheap pieces of hardware.
Re:Physical destruction (Score:5, Insightful)
No that's what security people and people speculating will tell you.
You do a full single pass of 0's to a disk and recover a single word document for me, a single one - I'll give you $1,000 cash.