wiping old hard drives
> If you can recover the data from a hard drive I wipe then I
> will double reimburse you for the cost of the recovery...and
> it's not cheap.
The government does have ways to recover data from a wiped hard drive. It's not fast, easy, cheap, or reliable, but it can be done.
Wiping the drive a single time with a stream of binary zeroes or ones would have the highest chance of recovering the prior data, because although faint, the previous magnetic traces of the data are still there (akin to how if you record silence over a previously recorded audio cassette and then play it back, you can sometimes still hear traces of the previous recording in the background). Wiping the drive multiple times with a random stream of data would make recovery of the original data increasingly more difficult and less accurate.
Or, you can "wipe" the hard drive the old-fashioned way: open it up, turn it on (you might be amazed that many hard drives will still work fine with the cover completely removed, with the heads reading & writing data as normal, at least until enough dust builds up to impede their operation), and then apply sandpaper to the disc platter as it's spinning. I actually did the opposite once with an old Seagate full-height 5-1/4" hard drive: I removed its read/write heads, glued a round disc of sandpaper to its top platter, and then used it as a rotary sander. Its motor had quite a lot of torque!
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