If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[Monty J. Harder]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:24 AM, <jim at jimani.com> wrote:


> thousands of passes rather than dozens of passes.  And there was concern
> that the software might be doing all its writing to a disk buffer somewhere
> in RAM rather than the actual disk.  So I guess if you want to "wipe"


I don't believe that dd writes to a disk buffer in RAM.  Certainly, the
drive itself may use a write buffer, but writing the entire disk would
easily exhaust that buffer.  I don't know why they would want thousands of
passes though. They may have had a point back in the days of MFM hard
drives, but encoding schemes have become very sophisticated.  Modern hard
drives must employ extensive error correction codes just to be able to read
the last written contents of a sector reliably, I stand by my contention
that alternating 0s and random junk for a total of a dozen passes should
render the data completely inaccessible to anyone (with the possible
exception of those spy agencies, and I'm not even sure about them).
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