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Not a study, but an interesting data point: http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted.

$40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".

$40.00 US DOLLARS!!! And they can keep a 60$ HDD!!! For performing a time-intensive, expensive procedure! Yeah, that totally shows everyone...

Oh and most challengers also wouldn't be able to disassemble the drive. And would have to publicly disclose the method used (heh, yeah, I can totally see the NSA jumping at the opportunity to prove some random Internet blogger wrong while disclosing all their methods). I'm sorry, but that challenge is so obviously a joke, it's actually sad, because people think it answers... well, anything. (source, BTW. Original source has absolutely zero info AFAICT.)

http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted
http://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough-part-2-this-time-with-screenshots
(Key quotes: Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory by Peter Gutmann (35 pass wipe originated from Mr. Gutmann)

âoeAny modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I donâ(TM)t see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.â)
(Article itself) http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

I laugh whenever I see comments like this. Lest we forget that nobody ever accepted The Great Zero Challenge, let alone beat it.

Hahaha, probably because the challenge only offers a reward of $40 USD and they won't let you disassemble the drive, which is a requirement for any of the wiped-data-recovery papers/theories floating around.

Stephen Christian, a computer expert at Oxymap ehf, told the Grapevine that ... "Information written to disk can be recovered by experts even after being overwritten several times unless you let the computer run for a few hours constantly 'covering up' its information. Computer hackers know this."

I laugh whenever I see comments like this. Lest we forget that nobody ever accepted The Great Zero Challenge, let alone beat it.

Even after hitting tons of major news sites, the challenge went unanswered.

First, overwriting with zeros is enough on any modern drive. No one has ever recovered anything from a drive that has simply been zeroed, even with a SEM. It's only been theorized that it could be possible. However, simply formatting a drive does not over write the data, so that is not enough to clear the data.
http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted

However, the joke came from the guy saying he could recover about 50% of the bits on a zeroed drive. Since the bits can only be 0 or 1 simply guessing would yield 50% correct.

What about "The Great Zero Challenge" that ended back in January? I tried going to the site but 16 Systems seems to have taken it down. Was anyone ever able to recover the files from the drive? I can find some peripheral information concerning the data recovery challenge... but yea, as far sa I know dd should be able to "zero" (with /dev/null used as the input) out a hard drive quite well... http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted

Looks like you missed out on some cash: http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted

Oh, really. You should have one of those good forensic guys go here and accept the challenge on that page; it would be pretty financially lucrative, if what you say is true. But it isn't true; such a recovery is impossible until proven otherwise.

I ran into the same problem. You'd think Google would be able to remove these fake review sites from the top 10 search results. In any event, I found Hostjury.com to be a good place to get reviews of different hosting service providers.

You actually trust GoDaddy in the first place?

http://hostjury.com/blog/5/godaddy-suspends-domain s-on-request

They've been suspending domains for awhile now for little to no reason.