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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?
Hire one of those disillusioned young IT workers!
At work, its well known that all past warranty dead drives go to me, as well as ones that work but are too slow and small to be useful. And I make sure the drive in question is definitely wiped :)
For the curious, it usually takes a hot 357 magnum to penetrate and clear most modern drives. 9mm and 45acp either bounce off, or don't exit the drive.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
To 'clean' the drives.
Sledgehammer works good too.
We always take them apart. The magnets are fun to play with.
Will it blend?
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
Rip them open, pull the platters out one by one, and make a high definition mirror, knowing every time you look at yourself you're doing it on several levels.
A drill bit is cheaper and easier. It also avoids those awkward ricochets and overshoots that put holes in people. This makes it difficult for all but the most determined people to read.
Dropping it in salt water is a sure way to destroy the data but this takes longer.
As for buried date treasure, don't bother. If you did not find it when you put the drive down and have not missed it, you don't need it.
Plenty of people have fooled around with hard drive platters as bladeless Tesla turbines...though the new base materials shatter more easily than the old.
-Benjamin Vander Jagt
...go fishing for blackmail material. You'll find that Christmas 2008 will be much better for you than Christmas 2007.
How paranoid must one really be?
Hit the drives hard with a decent size hammer, a couple of times on each side, just so that anyone can plainly see that the drives are toast and totally useless as computer parts.
After the smashing, just toss 'em in a bucket. When the bucket fills up, take it down to your friendly neighborhood scrap yard. If you're lucky, they'll pay a "dirty aluminum" rate for it. If you're unlucky, they'll pay a miscellaneous scrap rate, which will be considerably lower (around a nickel per pound, here).
Or if you're really adventurous/thrifty, you can break them down into their different constituent metals (keep it simple and just sort into piles of aluminum, zinc, magnetic steel, and nonmagnetic stainless), which will maximize the amount of cash you'll be paid.
Honestly: Nobody wants to invest the time, effort, money, and energy into trying to scavenge data from a physically broken hard drive at the bottom of a scrap hopper without knowing, in advance, what is contained therein.
But if you're really paranoid, you can always yank the platters and melt them into little aluminum ingots first. It just doesn't seem worth the effort for household data . . .
In any event, you can be sure that the drives will, at some point, be recycled into something new.
Kid-proof tablet..
Will it blend?
A: I would imagine so.
I made some contemporary art out of my old hard drives:
http://polynomial.org/disc_wall2.jpg
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
All electronics that fail me suffer the same fate.
... until its no longer fun to do either one.
Smash, apply ethanol, burn, smash, apply ethanol, burn
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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.
This is a personal problem. There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable use of high explosives. This is not one of those exceptions.
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.
Prop the HD up with a tooth pick. Put a piece of cheese right next to the toothpick. If you use one of the really old heavy as fuck HDs, you'll be having mouse pizza for breakfast.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I recommend divorce.
I took one out last week with a horizontal saw with a fine pitch blade for cutting hard metal.
I sawed directly through the middle of the platter, cutting through the motor. It made a very neat cutaway study. Might make some art with it, dunno. It was also fun to watch.
I guess this is pretty secure!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
25 ml of gasoline and a camping stove, that would be _more_ than enough.
Just because the iron-platinum compounds used in modern HDs have a very high curie-temperature doesnt mean that the tiny magnetic domains dont become superparamagnetic at a few 100C at most.
Otherwise, just erase them.
All this "we can real deleted files because of remanent magnetisation" is _CRAP_ . This was possible 15 years ago, when servos were misaligning over time.
And may 10 years ago, when bits were still sized in um. Nowadays, the spatial resolution of HD heads is in the same order of magnitude as magnetic force microscopy.
I know a scientist working with magnetic materials who is actually trying to use perpenticular recording HD heads in a scanning microscopy, just because the technique is so fast.
Reading even a non-deleted hd is a long, hard experience with MFMs. Take your second per byte. Deleted is just impossible (superparamagnetic limit again. If the domain is polarized in a way the drive reads 0, there is simply not enough magnetic moment left to form any kind of "1" near it thats not thermally fluctuating). Even if it _were_ possible, we would be talking about days per kbyte with expensive instruments. Even _finding_ a file could take months.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
not for security, although you could, say, scour the platters with sandpaper if that's your concern.
I take them apart to admire the incredible workmanship that goes into them; the mirror polished platters and the wonderfully light head mechanisms that float so incredibly close over them.
Hard disks may be mass produced and cheap, but the care and perfection that goes into them would set most jewelers to shame. They are really works of beauty.
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It's the only way to be sure.
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