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You have some knowledge of Professor Peter Gutmann’s work on secure data deletion and recovery, has Gutmann been promoting snake oil for the last decade?

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/

I used to design hard disk drives and know what can be done with the right equipment as far as recovery is concerned. Of course we are talking major bucks to buy this equipment, and skill to use it, nothing a common crook would know about or have the money to acquire. So cheap software would do the trick for most.

Drives can have data preserved in the sectors not overwritten in normal operation, that may be recovered. So special software, that works at device level, doing the erase is required. Norton has a simple overwrite erase package for few dollars.

Most of this is holdover from back from when a hard drive costs thousands not tens of dollars. One of the first drives I designed cost $10000 and stored all of 10 MB. The easy way for most people is just physical destruction, a big hammer. It's only necessary to bust up the HDA, the aluminum object, the electronics is meaningless. You can even open it up and severely bend the discs and have good security. If you plan on selling the drive, or even reusing the drive on another system, then the special erase software is probably sufficient.

Today I just destroy with the hammer all of my old drives. Same with most large IT shops, just smash them up, that's the advice I give to clients.