knb comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2010 08:01:56PM 3 points [-]

I think I saw that paper before, either on here or on Hacker News, and it was replied to by someone who claimed to be from a data-recovery service that could and did use electron microscopes to retrieve the info, albeit very expensively.

EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511541

Comment author: DavidNelson 21 January 2010 09:27:24PM 11 points [-]

I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn't mind a link. The "expensive" prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don't claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn't really his field), or is lying.

Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 22 January 2010 03:06:52AM *  6 points [-]

I agree.

I remember that the c't, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.

Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 22 January 2010 02:52:30AM 6 points [-]

The "expensive" prices he quotes actually seem really low.

Plus, he says it would take them a month. How could they possibly charge only 1000 for a month of anything, even computer time?