Degaussed Hard drive

[willriker]

the whole reason NASA, and many other companies, require that drives be degaussed is that it is a permanent erasure of data. There is no way to recover it. The hard drive is rendered nigh useless. This is done for security reasons. I dont really need to go into the various security reasons, when you are talking about companies who have relationships to military, or some government agencies, this is standard operating procedure.

end lesson of my contribution is that these companies degauss... not for being able to reuse hard drives, a simple reformat would be sufficiant for that, they do it to completely destroy the data on the drive.

[Metrosio]

It is, however, horizontally useful.

[xopher]

Degaussing is the removal of magnetism from the drive. The magnets that polarize the platter are rendered useless.


Not to mention if you properly degaussed the drive (rotating the drive three times, flipping it, rotating 3 more times), you've dragged the heads across the physical surface of the platters and destroyed them physically.