Gutmann Method

The Gutmann method is an algorithm for securely erasing data from hard disk drives and other storage media, developed by Peter Gutmann and Colin Plumb and presented in their 1996 paper on secure deletion of data from magnetic and solid-state memory. It overwrites the target storage area with a sequence of 35 distinct patterns, most of them designed for the encoding schemes used by older MFM and RLL hard disks, on the assumption that the user does not know which encoding scheme a given drive uses. Gutmann later noted that the method had become less relevant as modern drives moved away from those encoding schemes, and since around 2001 many ATA IDE and SATA drives support the ATA Secure Erase standard, which removes the need to apply his 35-pass method for a complete erase. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/