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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Back when I used to work for others, I would always remove the disk drive and replace it with an identical uet fresh out of the box one and a fresh Windows install. A few hundred dollars and a little work is a small price to pay.
That's not worth the price at all. There is really no risk
Freelancers take about 100$ pee hour where I live. (and thats a low rate, usually it's more)
Whith theoretical possibilities like https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10192v1 you still have to do multiple passes, which takes hours, even on an NVME.
Even running something like https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10446654 takes more than an hour.
A new 1TB nvme can be had for 60$ on amazon. Swapping it takes 5 minutes. So unless the client pays for the time, it is not worth it.
When I worked in an IT office, we often had multiple erase and clone processes going at the same time. We used machines like this: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Bay-eSATA-SATA-Standalone/dp/B005CQ12W2 (First search result). We started the process and worked on other stuff. We had a flat fee of €40 or something for a HDD to SSD upgrade (clone + erase + installation). The actual work was 15-20 minutes.
Nobody is wasting actual time when you can just have the process going when doing other stuff.
I agree that it is worth it at scale, but for a freelancer it won't make much financial difference getting a new drive after a project.
GDPR laws are a big part of it. It's illegal to not protect the privacy of your customers. We even shipped the erased disks to a specialized company.
But also, the only way for this whole "just get them a new disk" to be profitable is if you resell the old disks as new disks. Which just sounds like evil capitalism to me.
I don't think we are arguing about the same scenario at all.
Here is an example of what I have in mind:
As opposed to
My argument is, that the cost of the first process is negligible compared to the effort and hassle of the second process, for a freelancer that earns over 6x the cost of such drive per hour.
My scenario was indeed handling the drives of customers themselves.
For your scenario I would just use some encrypted filesystem.