Kovar, Next you will be saying that the Seals fly in "black" helicopters.
Hi all
What an interesting post, with some well thought out solutions.
My fun side is starting to come out, so here is my tongue in cheek response.
1) Wipe the drive using whatever
2) open the drives and remove the ceramic magnets and platters, leave ceramic magnets on the platters overnight (will seriously mess up any trace data)
3) give the ceramic magnets to the local high school - they can use them in science experiments - or keep and play with them yourself, they are cool and very, very strong, and fun to play with
4) using a jewelers drill make a small hole at the edge of each platter and make "High Tech" mobiles - decorate your office, or give away as Xmas presents LOL
or
bend each platter - no way to restore data after bending the media
I hope this helps )
Kbear
Might there be environmental concerns with "venting" gases from burning HDD materials?
I do like the idea, though…
Appropriate amounts of C-4 works well, too. (Appropriate is relative to how big of a bang you like.) wink
What I was alluding to is;
If one is so paranoid that drives may be intercepted and read between leaving your custody and the custody of the company who will destroy them, is to destroy the drives yourself. The ONLY 100% guaranteed way is to physically destroy them, albeit by making mobiles, coffee coasters, bending media, etching media surface, or even C-4 LOL. Given enough time and money (equipment) can anyone guarantee with 100% surety that the data is gone? At some point you must trust the system.
Just my thoughts
Kbear
A quick way to render the drive useless is to drill a hole through the top of the drive and through each platter. If you have more than ten drives check into an inexpensive drill press < $100. About 10 to 30 seconds a drive for 1 to 3 platter (metal platter) drives. (Increase time for two or three holes)
One additional step
(a)Make a slurry of Comet / water and pour into the drive. The Comet / water should oxidize the platters.
(b) Pour some sand in the drive hole then power up the drive to let it spin.
Alt(Stress reliever){
String thump="sledge hammer";
String item="HD";
String baseB="anvil";
}
System.out.println( thump+" "+item+" "+base+" = no worries");
Of course this only applies to straight physical HD as there are Hybrid and SSD drives in various systems.
Conspiracy theorists would say
And it's not paranoia if they are really out to get you, amirite?
Did someone say destroy HDDs and relieve stress?
And a little collection from
Thanks for the replies. I learned today that there are various ways out there to destroy a hard drive. I laughed a lot at some of the techniques, haha D
The point is, we recently reached an agreement with the recycle company. Next to hard drives, their also are going to recycle other products like old monitors for us. We actually get paid a minor amount of money after we exported X products to them.
So thats the reason why I'm kind of locked up in this situation. I have no other choice than to do it softwarematically. I just found an old tower case and PSU which I can use for the process.
I believe that DBAN does not erase the bad sector table, so in theory someone could work with the bad sectors and recover some data depending on how many might be contiguous and / or related.
I have been told that because of the density of newer drives it is hard to determine if the bit is up or down now a days. So the 1 wipe is sufficient. Again conspiracy theorist debate.
I would have to agree with degauss comment and probably a drill bit through the platters technique as well for added measure.
Yes, which is why I specified venting . . .
Might there be environmental concerns with "venting" gases from burning HDD materials?
I do like the idea, though…
Appropriate amounts of C-4 works well, too. (Appropriate is relative to how big of a bang you like.) wink
if you are not using the hard drives again your cost to permanently discard the machines is a self cleaning oven and venting.[…]
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