Low level format

[itPro]

As a programmer, I can tell you that it would be just as easy to run a script 20 times in order to wipe 20 hard drives at once. You would just be opening 20 instances of the command prompt. If you could do 20 machines at once and those 20 machines could connect to 3 extra drives each, then you could cipher 60 drives at once, rather than 20. I'm assuming that since you say you worked for the military that you obviously had a legitimate IT department and things such as network storage devices and monetary resources that could be put toward useful devices.

That script, in the form of a batch file, could also easily run the cipher script. You wouldn't even have to alter any registry keys, if you added the drives to a network storage device or even to another computer that booted from another drive. If you compare rebooting every machine with a special disc that you have to interact with to removing the hard drive and sticking it in a hot-swappable storage device, I think it would be faster to remove the hard drive. You wouldn't really be doing 20 at once, if you had to sit down at each machine in order to interact with the program that wipes it.

With Altiris, deploying software is as easy as drag-and-drop, so you could technically wipe your entire organization at once, let alone only 800 machines.

As for slaving the drives, I haven't found that to be necessary with my SATA drives. Older PATA systems are probably more of a pain, however.

With all of this said, however, we still have to go back to the original question. He really just wanted to hear examples of software packages that could be used to make data unrecoverable. Cipher is great at doing that, regardless of the steps it requires. Obviously every method requires a process, and it's all a matter of personal preference. It's okay for you to think that your way is great, but that is no reason to say that this Windows utility is not on equal footing. It's easier and does a better job, from where I'm standing, but try it for yourself, if you want. Just don't knock it until you try it.