Wiping Hard Drives

I run into people all the time who have been told over and over, that whatever is on the drive is always easily retrievable even after being erased with zero-fill, but that is not necessarily true. It all depends on how far one wants to go in order to prevent any possible chance of retrieval no matter how remote, but the reality is that even one pbutt of a good zero-fill program should destroy data to the point that it would take a specialist in computer forensics and data retrieval techniques using spcialized equipment and laboratory conditions to get *anything* back resembling the orginal data, and even then the results may be completely unusable. It would be beyond the capability of most commerical data retrieval firms, and most certainly beyond the reach of anyone using off-the-shelf data recovery software. Just because he wanted a multipbutt security wipe doesn't mean he has anything criminal on the drive, and he certainly need not justify his reasoning for wanting such a program. I routinely get customers who want personal financial info scrubbed from old system they are giving to friends family, etc. and have to be rebuttured that even a zero-fill is adequate for that need, because of the amount of misinformation they hear.