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How to Say Goodbye to Old Hard Drives?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
To 'clean' the drives.
Sledgehammer works good too.
We always take them apart. The magnets are fun to play with.
Yes. Go buy yourself a harddrive enclosure that has a USB interface.
Smash the things into itty-bitty pieces. Very (very very) strong magnets work well too.
Neat little device
These things are great:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1945393&Sku=S457-1104
they work, they're simple, when closed they're virtually indestructible, when open, you can swap drives in seconds, hot-swapped and everything. IDE and SATA. I've used multiple brands, they're all the same. Some have a power switch if you care.
If the drives are IDE/ATA/SATA, this works well and is a better idea than rotating them through an enclosure. (I find that the captive cables in USB drive enclosures are not very robust. This does not share that problem.)
.sig: file not found
I have one of these for situations like this. It's pretty handy; it also comes in really great for harddrive upgrades:
http://www.coolmaxusa.com/productDetails.asp?item=CD-350-COMBO&details=features&subcategory=converter&category=converter
As far as disposal: open up the drives, take out the platters and use them for decorations or melt them, salvage the armature magnets for your refrigerator, recycle the metal.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I used to work at a nonprofit agency that took (among other things) computers that were then handed out to community centers, senior centers, churches, etc. People were always donating computers sans hard drives because they didn't want anyone to steal their info. So the warehouse had literally hundreds of unusable computers. PLEASE use the commercial or free open source package of your choice to wipe the thing then donate it! Nonprofits that deal in second hand computers are in dire need of spare hard drives of even modest capacity. And no, the lady who wants to print up the church newsletter is not some 133t h4x0r who is going to recover the wiped data and steal your identity.
Good stuff. I routinely use a similar adapter for data recovery on failing drives. The concept seems to work just fine.
The same Vantec unit is also available from Newegg, but far cheaper.
Or, if one is feeling adventurous and/or wants lots of these adapters without going going broke, there's always Ebay, via which I've always had fantastic good luck ordering insanely inexpensive electronics like this directly from Hong Kong.
So far, importing things from Hong Kong only takes about as long to get here (Ohio) as stuff does from California, and it's cheaper than UPS.
Kid-proof tablet..
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=630 Eject the hard drives like they are a tape.
Glass platters look just like aluminum ones. It's hard to tell the difference until they break. When they do break, zillions of ultra-sharp slivers of glass go flying everywhere. It's way worse than breaking typical glass.
like this
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
There were some other posts regarding hazardous materials in electronics products. They are correct.
A furnace is going to vaporize and volatilize a lot of really nasty stuff. Burning the drives pollutes big time. If you aren't set up to scrub the exhaust, you are dumping who knows what into your back yard and your neighbor's yards. Plus, if you are breathing any of it, you are setting yourself up for any number of nasty lung diseases, possibly cancers, etc.
A Linux livecd (http://www.ubuntu.com, for example) usually has drivers to read (and write, if you have ntfs-3g enabled) NTFS formatted drives. Linux NTFS drivers ignore the Access Control Lists in NTFS, so permissions are not a problem. I've used it in similar scenarios, when Windows would give me headaches. Alternatively, if you are administrator of the machine, you can reset the permissions of a directory (and its contents) from within Windows, though I can't say I can recall how to do so offhand.
No longer are the rare-earth magnets in hard drives that powerful. In the past year I've disassembled many laptop and desktop hard drives (I turn the platters into throwing stars) and the magnets aren't very strong at all, nor are they as large as they used to be. They barely even phase CRT monitors, even when placed flat against the very back of the electron beam emitter.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
An induction furnace is an AC magnetic source that works paticularly well :)
Once it's above the curie temperature it is not magnetic anymore and the magnetic domains are going to be arranged differently as it cools. A bit higher in temperature and any grain boundaries that may happen to have coincided with magnetic domains (I'm sure I read something about some correlation once) will be gone as well as the crystal structure completely changes
I think you mean 1 part aluminium powder with 2 parts iron oxide.
The aluminium takes the oxygen from the iron oxide, releasing the sigificant amount of energy and leaving the unoxidised iron.
If the aluminium was already oxidised, this would not happen.
Otherwise, yes - excellent idea. I even have a broken HDD I need to wipe, thanks!