bit-bit HDD clone versus simple wipe.

[Sterlingattcc]

hello all,
I have a serious question for people that understand drive formatting better than myself.
I do a lot of basic drive wipes on HDDs using CCleaner(single pass entire drive). I'm assuming this is the equivalent of simply zeroing the drive and then reformatting when finished.

my question is that if a person were to perform one of these wipes on the drive and then put it into an automatic drive cloner that does bit for bit copy-over, would it be the equivalent of performing the wipe in CCleaner on the target drive?

 

[DR_Luke]

If the source drive is full of zeros, every sector copied from the source will write zeroes to the corresponding sector on the target. It would work fine as long as the source drive has equal or more sectors than the target.

To add to that, if you are looking for a fast free way to erase a drive, you can use the linux DD or ddrescue commands to copy /dev/zero to the target drive. They will just keep going until they get a write error when writing to a sector that doesn't exist.

 

[Snipergod87]

If it is a bit by bit copy it may be the same however say if its a bit by bit copy from from a 1TB drive to a 3TB drive the remaining 2TB will be able to be recovered easily. In general it is good to do a few random erases before selling or disposing of a HDD if you have sensitive information on it.

 

[USAFRet]

hello all,
I have a serious question for people that understand drive formatting better than myself.
I do a lot of basic drive wipes on HDDs using CCleaner(single pass entire drive). I'm assuming this is the equivalent of simply zeroing the drive and then reformatting when finished.

my question is that if a person were to perform one of these wipes on the drive and then put it into an automatic drive cloner that does bit for bit copy-over, would it be the equivalent of performing the wipe in CCleaner on the target drive?

It wouldn't be any faster, and due to the possible drive size differences...I'd rather do an actual wipe on each drive.

 

[Sterlingattcc]

I understand the limitations of using the cloner on disimilar-sized drives. I also understand that there is a limited field of usefulness to the process in general, unless you are attempting to wipe a large number of drives and have a limited number of workstations to plug them into, in which case the cloner would add additional wiping capacity at your workstation. This is mostly an academic discussion, but definitely one I would like to explore and get a definitive answer on.

 

[DR_Luke]

I've already given you a definitive answer. Every sector cloned, will overwrite the corresponding sector on the destination drive, rendering that sector unrecoverable.

 

[Sterlingattcc]

not necessarily if it simply ends up zeroing the drive. perhaps it would be better to ask whether the CCleaner simple wipe, single pass, is just a zeroing pass, or whether it makes a complete inversion wipe followed by zeroing.

 

[RolandJS]

I think this very good academic discussion has morphed into a better reality discussion, providing very good information about erasing hard-drives of varying sizes, I learned today, thanks everyone

 

[DR_Luke]

not necessarily if it simply ends up zeroing the drive. perhaps it would be better to ask whether the CCleaner simple wipe, single pass, is just a zeroing pass, or whether it makes a complete inversion wipe followed by zeroing.

To securely erase the drive, a simple pass of writing zeroes to every LBA sectors is sufficient...unless you are talking about a drive from the 80's.