ye i am positive i have two programs that do this and there is nothing whatsoever left on the drive and if the program can't do the  7 it will reject the drive as faulty Cheers

I actually think that a drive can be rewritten 100000 times and there will still be remnants of the original data. It may be difficult to retrieve though.

I doubt any government agency would be bothered trying to wipe them, they would (and should) play it safe and destroy them.

I always thought that the government (ASIO, CIA, etc) could still retrieve data from anything wiped by a commercially available product.

Given the cost of storage these days, it wouldn't concern me.