Why not just use BitLocker to wipe a drive?

These can be delivered on site for rent, sometimes it takes days to dismantle old arrays with thousands of SCSI drives, to replace them with brand new SAS Enclosure.

Then the company come back and take their machine and a couple days later you receive $$$ for all the precious metals recovered.

We do it once every 3-4 years to recover all the HDD we replaced. Most of the time peoples don't even worry about the content on these drives and rely on us to make safe disposal of their disks. We still erase all disks before trowing them in 45 gal drums and are in a locked room until D-Day.

hdmi said:

Special Publication 800-88. Yeah, that's the one that I've been looking for. A single pass overwrite typically hinders recovery. What it didn't say was that, also typically, the word 'typical' infers that more exceptions may still be found by doing further research on the matter.
On topic: typically, the Sky ECC app was thought to be safe. Typically, that turned out not to be so. As far as traditional HDDs are concerned: if in doubt, use DBAN.

Which takes us back to the original question: Why not just use BitLocker to encrypt the entire drive and then reformat it? Done. Would that leave any doubt? After reformat, even if there is any recoverable data it's worthless as it's encrypted. (Even better if the drive in question is already encrypted, then a reformat is all that's needed?)

ComputerGeek said:

Which takes us back to the original question: Why not just use BitLocker to encrypt the entire drive and then reformat it? Done. Would that leave any doubt?

Yes, it would (for reasons that I already tried to point out).

After reformat, even if there is any recoverable data it's worthless as it's encrypted. (Even better if the drive in question is already encrypted, then a reformat is all that's needed?)

See above. People originally thought is was safe, later it turned out not to be.