We recently had to destroy over 700 harddisks (10TB) because the customer didn't trust that a secure erase and full overwrite ways enough to make sure no data could be recovered.
It was really painful to watch....
It was really painful to watch....
I imagine that is where a lot of folks are at on this. Basically: It used to be possible, so maybe it still is. Not worth the risk, lets just go with the old best practices to be safe.
Even that has almost always been just a cargo cult. Some people (mainly from the hacker community) claimed that US government agencies can still read data from harddrives that have been erased. It has never been proven by any independent data recovery company.
It might have been somewhat true for MFM or RLL drives (these were before my time in IT), but at least since IDE drives, it was no longer true. However, the cult around "multiple erase cycles" still held, mainly because of companies like Norton etc. who sold snakeoil tools to "securely" erase your data
I guess I would have trust issues with the services the customer offered.