Saturday, July 01, 2006

Please don't put that hard disk in the bulk tape eraser

Scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (USA) have been busy with a project for the military that may have future application to audio and video surveillance and forensics by law enforcement. It addresses the problem of not having a universal eraser for all magnetic media.

With the explosion of new types of digital recording devices and storage media, equipment and procedures for reliably and efficiently erasing the media will likely become a pressing issue. The community has been through this before though. When digital audio tape (DAT) came out, quite a few professionals made the mistake of thinking that their old bulk (analog) tape erasers would wipe them clean, but the magnetic fields used for analog tape eraser were not strong enough for digital tape.

ScienceDaily link is here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Darn, I RTFA'd and it looks like they have already covered my idea of taking a blowtorch to the hard-disks.

I think it would be quite an experience to work on a research project where you could do cruel things to expensive kit :-).