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<blockquote data-quote="dcow" data-source="post: 1000530" data-attributes="member: 139944"><p>Actually, the reason behind a 35pass write is a little more practical than you'd think.&nbsp; The idea is that each 'bit' on a hard drive is like a magnetic &quot;box&quot;&nbsp; it's a little square portion of the harddrive that gets flagged as '1' or '0' by the head.&nbsp; This is a write.&nbsp; Now the head, it turns out, is not very accurate and it has a relatively big 'box' that it writes a much smaller 'bit' to.&nbsp; If you have a drive with a bunch of data on it, and you simply zero out the data, with the right tools, it's is actually very easy to analyze that zeroed out disk, and see where all the ones used to be.&nbsp; That's the general idea, it's a little more complicated than that (turns out you can even detect where original data used to be after say 3 or 4 passes [which is the idea behind a 7 pas overwrite] and the only way to have your data 99.99 percent unrecoverable is to write over it 35 times) but you get the idea.&nbsp; If I was selling my harddrive and I had sensitive information on there then there is no reason not to be cautious.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="dcow, post: 1000530, member: 139944"] Actually, the reason behind a 35pass write is a little more practical than you'd think. The idea is that each 'bit' on a hard drive is like a magnetic "box" it's a little square portion of the harddrive that gets flagged as '1' or '0' by the head. This is a write. Now the head, it turns out, is not very accurate and it has a relatively big 'box' that it writes a much smaller 'bit' to. If you have a drive with a bunch of data on it, and you simply zero out the data, with the right tools, it's is actually very easy to analyze that zeroed out disk, and see where all the ones used to be. That's the general idea, it's a little more complicated than that (turns out you can even detect where original data used to be after say 3 or 4 passes [which is the idea behind a 7 pas overwrite] and the only way to have your data 99.99 percent unrecoverable is to write over it 35 times) but you get the idea. If I was selling my harddrive and I had sensitive information on there then there is no reason not to be cautious. [/QUOTE]

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