&gt;but it&#x27;s probably not enough to persuade other people that it&#x27;s gone.<p>I believe there is a long standing bounty for anyone who can retrieve useful data from a drive that had been zero&#x27;d once. No one has been able to thus far.<p>A lot of the disk wiping &quot;culture&quot; stems from a much earlier time when disk technology was less reliable, especially in regards to writes. Dan Gutmann himself says that the Gutmann method  is long antiquated and only worked with MFM&#x2F;RLL encoded disks from the 80s and early 90s.<p>Perhaps instead of humoring these people, we should be educating them. A zero&#x27;d out disk is a wiped disk until someone proves otherwise.