If I remove one HDD from a RAID0-with-striping, is it impossible to read data from remaining HDD?

Question

I have a laptop with a virtual hard drive composed of two 500GB Hitachi HDDs set up using Intel Rapid Data Storage RAID0 striped configuration.

The Windows installation became corrupted and I haven't been able to rescue it. At one stage while trying to recover, I could boot using a boot disk and read the data on the drives. Stuff like unprotected Firefox password files, emails, etc.

I have backups and now I want to make sure my data is either erased or at least very difficult to read.

I could create a new boot disk with utilities to do a low level format on the drives before I give the laptop to be recycled. I am quite security conscious.

However after reading this

Can someone explain RAID-0 in plain English?

it occurred to me that one HDD might be completely unreadable if I just remove the other HDD, because of the nature of the RAID0 striping and how it writes the data across the HDDs.

Is that correct? If so, I can save myself a few hours if I don't have to do the low level format.

Answer 1

It's true that the array cannot be rebuilt with half of the data missing.
However, depending on the stripe size (4, 8, 16, 64kb etc), some data will still be visible on the remaining drive. Even the smallest stripe of 4000 bytes is more than enough to store a full password. So really it just comes down to chance if your sensitive data was split between the two drives (Even then, if enough of the data is on the remaining drive, someone may be able to fill in the gaps).
It would be best to at least do one pass of zero filling on each drive I'd you intend to get rid if them.