Zeroing hard drive enough for resale?

[Durbrow]

I will be sending in my 80 GB hard drive to OWC/macsales for a small rebate. I erased it using Disk Utility and the zeroing option for secure erase (took about 45 minutes). Is this sufficient for wiping a hard drive or would you advise using stronger measures? Or would you advise simply trashing the drive? Thanks!

[Mikuro]

That should be enough to prevent data recovery by ordinary software. It might not be enough to prevent recovery by professional data-recovery services, though. If you're afraid of someone spending hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to recover your data, you should use Disk Utility's option to overwrite the disk with random data 7 times (or if you're extra paranoid, 35 times). You can expect that to take 7 (or 35) times as long as zeroing. So that would be several hours or about a full day.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Unless you're storing all your credit card information, NASA alien secrets, or nuclear bomb plans, then what Mikuro said is great: what you've done already is sufficient.

Hackers aren't going to want recipes, family photos, your web browsing cookies, old papers from college or any of the kinds of documents people typically store on their computers. Even if they came across them, they wouldn't do them any good.

What you've done is enough... but if you suspect that there will be people expecting you to ship your hard drive and are laying in wait to steal it and forensically resurrect your data in order to use it against you for their gain, then you need to destroy your hard drive. Otherwise, ship it.