Secure Erase

This summarize the article from Craig Wright. He is a Director with Information Defense in Australia.

In the article, Erasing drives should be quick and easy, he shows us a way to perform secure erase. Also he stated a few FUD on data recovering like:

• X-Ray machines and scanners will erase a drive;
• SEM or AFM (electron microscopy will do) could be used to recover data;
• Government or NSA can read your wiped drives;

The simplest manner to wipe hard disk is using the the firmware Secure Erase command on an ATA, SATA, PATA, etc drives. A full erase using SE takes 30 min to 1 hour to complete. Basically it is quick. It is non-recoverable. It saves all the BS. It removes the need for the FUD that still surrounds us.

Here's the steps to wipe a drive using hdparm utility:

1. Login as root.
2. Ensure the drive isn't security frozen (result shows "not frozen"): hdparm -I /dev/sda
3. Issue command by set user password, Security =Maximum (Master Password = Blank): hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass Eins /dev/sda
4. Issue command to confirm the process with the the word "enabled" in the output: hdparm -I /dev/sda
5. Issue the AT SE command: hdparm --user-master u --security-erase Eins /dev/sda
6. Issue command to ensure output verification return "not enabled": hdparm -I /dev/sda

References:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/
• http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
• https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase