Comment Re:Jump The Shark (Score 1) 128
It sort of depends on the value of your secrets. People are reasonably certain that if you wipe random data over a disk 32 times that it can never be recovered, reasonably certain, with current technology anyway, well with the current technology we know about anyway. Now you have to ensure of course that it's been done properly and some dimwit hasn't just cleared a partition instead of the whole volume, and of course when you start dealing with SSD's or more expensive drives with smarter controllers your ability to actually do a write to every sector to achieve this goal is somewhat questionable, and of course doing a 32 times rewrite on a large drive is going to take a few days to actually finish, days you're paying someone you trust with that data to sit and watch it, well presumably anyway.
On the other hand, physically destroying the disc is much faster and much more effective, depending on what the company charges, it might actually even be cheaper since you could actually do it to a whole bunch of hard drives at once.
Is it probably excessive if you're the radio shack at the mall? Sure, if you're the government though?