Quote:
Originally Posted by Halcyon
To really erase everything you need to run the eraser program about 20 to 30 times by which time the heads will have been working non stop and the drive will probably be on it's way out.
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That certainly used to be the case with old drives, due to the way that the tracks were spaced.
These days, with more modern drives, a single overpass will usually provide sufficient assurance against everything except a microscopic recovery. 4-5 overwrites (with the right product) is more than enough to almost completely defeat the majority of recovery techniques[1].
[1]Let's just say that you'd need LOTS of money, time, and resources, to recover anything at all - even then you probably wouldn't get any data that was of any use to you.