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I'm looking for a bulk tape eraser for erasing an amount tapes, floppies and IDE hard disks for which I'm too busy for to erase them all by hand. I could dispose of it safely but that would be a waste of functioning magnetic media (can you see my dilemma).
There's a few of those "Realistic" ones on eBay but they're probably not for 230 V outlets.
I have one of those Radio Shack tape erasers and the duty cycle is very low. 1 minute on and 30 minutes off. There is a thermal cutoff so you can't push it much past that. It recommends 10-20 seconds per side, so it's really only good for erasing a couple items at a time. I'm also not sure you would want to use it on a hard drive, even if it could handle 230V.
Unfortunately I don't know of anything better besides a professional degausser, which is not cheap, even secondhand.
Using a degausser on a hard disk will not erase but destroy it, as you are also wiping the servo tracking information, which is needed for the drive to work at all. But with those hand-held tape/floppy disk bulk erasers, you can not harm a hard disk anyway. You need a crazy amount of energy to degauss a hard disk (7.000 Gauss at least to be on the safe side).
Note that some tape formats have pre-recorded calibration data on them as well. Generally, with the exception of soft-sectored floppy disks and audio tapes, degaussing is something you do to erase private data before trashing the media. You should not see it as a quick and easy way to wipe data for reusing the media.
Thanks for the information, I didn't realise there's tracking information on IDE drives as well. Any tips on bulk erasing the drives, unattended and with the least amount of user interaction?
For the floppies and audio tapes, I would probably still look for one of the handheld devices.
For hard drives, I use either DBan (free version) or HDAT2, which is also good for checking run hours and bad block counts.
DBan can do many at once if you have the right setup for scsi.
It's not about the interface. Any hard disk using a voice coil to move the heads has such data pre-recorded, as that is the only way for the drive to know where the heads are positioned.
As for erasing the drive: diskpart with "clean", "create partition primary" and "format" will completely fill the drive with 0x00. This is not military-grade, but unless you read the platters on a flux level, there is no data restoring possible after that.
