[MountainMac]

I am parting out my Rev. A TiBook because the display died and I just bought a 17". Since this is a one-time deal, I really can't justify the $30 pricetag for SuperScrubber (and much to my chagrin, the demo version didn't actually "do" anything). Since I don't have any information vital to National Security on my old hard drive, is the "8 Way Random Write Format" option in Panther's Disk Utility a reasonable length to go to to protect myself from identity theft, etc.?

[tooki]

It's FAR more than you need to protect yourself. Identity thieves aren't gonna waste their time and $25,000 trying to recover data from a drive that was overwritten even just one time. (Zeroing the drive is enough to deter all but the most very motivated data thief. It is NOT trivial to recover data from a zeroed drive.)

tooki

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by tooki:
It's FAR more than you need to protect yourself. Identity thieves aren't gonna waste their time and $25,000 trying to recover data from a drive that was overwritten even just one time. (Zeroing the drive is enough to deter all but the most very motivated data thief. It is NOT trivial to recover data from a zeroed drive.)

tooki

Also, it takes utterly FOREVER to run this on a whole drive. I know, I tried. Zeroing once is indeed sufficient.

[MountainMac]

Thanks. That's exactly what I needed to hear.

BTW, the "8 Way Random Write Format" is in its 24th hour already, and appears to be about 2/3 done according the status indicator.

MM