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Perhaps the most time consuming part is ensuring that all data on disk drives are wiped. A typical single-pass overwrite takes 1-2 hours.
However, there are still many beliefs, even at professional IT levels, that data has to be overwritten several times to ensure that it cannot be recovered. Those are myths!
September 2012, the American government agency National Institute for Standards and Technology has drafted an update of their Guidelines for Media Sanitization, affirming what their standards from 2006 also said: A single-pass overwrite is fine.
For storage devices containing Legacy Magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as 0s typically prevents recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data.
The new guidelines will be finalized from November 30.
FAIR follows the guidelines of NIST. Hard drives are tested for inaccessible sectors ("bad blocks"), wiping is verified by sampling data from the drive after. If something fails during the wipe, the hard drive is physically destroyed.
Furthermore, FAIR is updating their software, LCRS (Large-scale Computer Reuse Suite), adding support for ATA Secure Delete, a hardware standards protocol in which the firmware of the hard drive completely erases everything and resets all of its internal memory. This will speed up the overwriting process up to 8 times.