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Christmas Tree Made From 70 SCSI Hard Drives
Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array.
Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat.
With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree.
In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.
Fir post!
...if he had made 2 trees to run in RAID 0.
It burns!
Send it back to the depths of Hell whence it came!
One comment and slashdotted already... anyone have a mirror?
How did we go from DOD erasure to removing the platters to make a tree? The data could still be recovered in its current tree state!
insert inflammatory comment here!
TFA shows a "tree" made of disk platters -- all shiny silver, no green. What's with the generic green xmas tree pic in the summary? Is that one of those "category" images?
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Posted picture is not the SCSI tree, you actually have to RTFA to see it
It would be nice if the picture attached to the story showed the actual tree. The site is barely loading....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
When people made creative things out of old equipment. Haven't seen a good set of Christmas ornaments or bling from outdated equipment for a while. Years ago it was everywhere. Burnt platters, melted CDs, old tape tinsel....ahhh geekmas.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Merry Christmas Hosting Provider_01
So SCSI drives are actually made out of christmas trees ?
With Linux as an OS for your tree, you could make the LED status lights blink in time with a Christmas song you had stored on one of the drives ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here is the photo: http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/7811/tree14zq5.jpg
Only if you have root access.
Jewtube?
Stay classy.
Another samzenpus classic article.
1. samzenpus seems not to know where the Idle section is.
2. Irrelevant photo in summary.
3. Slashdotted site for TFA, rendering article completely pointless.
Every time it's the same. Is there a way to filter stories to cut out ones from individual editors? Samzenpus' contributions are invariably poor. Did he used to work for Digg?
In the post, he displays a bunch of youtube links and refers to them as "Jewtube". Did I miss a meme or is that supposed to be some sort of anti-semitic dig at YouTube?
Relevant cut and paste (since people are reporting the site as down now):
Jewtube videos, make sure you watch in high quality (below links are hq links)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pam5qLu8CwY&fmt=18 - shiny outside video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D2SfiYZwTM&fmt=18 - pretty inside video, it's a bit dark but the leds make it look pretty as it spins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soqL6ol3yIs&fmt=18 - reflection of faces as it spins, somewhat trippy and very under-water-esque
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGyOcTHnBD4&fmt=18 - night time reflection in the ceiling, spooky and very scary... mostly
That does not resemble, nor is it likely to be confused with a Christmas Tree.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
You must have a lot of free time at work. What branch of the Quebec government do you work at? I'm in Licensing.
As opposed to everybody else here who are so busy that they don't even have the time to look at Slashdot. Oh, wait...
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Apparently the reason the original post contains a photo unrelated to the story in any way is that the ACTUAL photo that goes with the story looks like a sloppy pile of garbaged stacked with the care of an autistic child told to put away his toys before he can have cake.
here you guys go.. http://whaleinacubicle.com/hdd_christmas_tree/.
Sorry it is so rushed, gotta catch a flight..
happy holidays.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Someone formatted my Christmas tree!!
Will that be pre-order, in-order, or post-order traversal?
Correctness matters. Mercy matters more.
fsck that!
Face your daemons!
And having it all in a tree makes it easier to search, too!
"My Dad is a TV repairman. He has this ULTIMATE set of tools. I can rebuild that array"
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
What's that all about? It's Christmas isn't it? I really hate this PC crap, my Brother-in-Law (Muslim) doesn't say happy bloody holidays at Eid.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I have 15 hard drives that I've collected over the years, and I want to get rid of them. I tried wiping them clean using sdelete from sysinternals, but this is really, really slow, and I'm not certain of how good that will work. Afterwards, for each hard drive, I connected it to my computer using a USB conversion kit, then as I copied something to the drive, I took a hammer and smashed it while it was writing until it made very weird noises.
Unfortunately, this isn't good enough for me, so I started disassembling the hard drives, and physically bending the platters, as well as taking the strong magnets located in the arm, and using that to hopefully wipe out some of the magnetic data stored there.
My question: do the internals of hard drives contain some sort of chemical that I should be concerned about? I have about 15 of these drives I want to destroy, so any exposure to chemicals might be a lot.
I remember when:
It was easy to decorate with all the CDs from AOL.
We'll need a solution to the traveling reindeer problem to figure that out.
The guy could have at least used some of the drive spindle motors to make it spin on its own.
Yeah, I want to see it spinning at 15K.
(from behind bulletproof glass)
Why not just use a 12V drill to make multiple holes on the platter, and then microware the whole thing??? Works for me.
"imagine a beowolf cluster" apply for diskspace...?
Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat... The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39.
Sounds like you already had a nut - the one building the tree. I'm guessing you either:
deltree /y
Here it is: http://www.nzgames.com.nyud.net:8080/forums/showthread.php?t=81672
Mmmmhhh I expected something different, but anyway a really cool X-mas tree.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Or if he had millions of old SCSI drives - imagine a Beowulf cluster of these trees.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Does "dismantel" mean "take something off the mantel"? I'm going to dismantel my Christmas cards around New Year's Day.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
boo!
Can't read the slashdotted article, but from the youtube video it looks like, instead of properly disposing of your DoD data, you put it in your front yard where anyone could snag a platter unnoticed and then announced your "accomplishment" on Slashdot so everyone can go find your data.
How did you get this job? Somebody call Security.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I am pretty sure (as most industrial level data recovery clean rooms could still pull data off those platters given enough time) that the DoD would not be pleased to see that sitting in someone's residence :p
You read my mind. The link is slashdotted so I couldn't check the details, but if he removed the platters from a DoD secure area without the blessing of their IA guy, then he should loose his job, and potentially has criminal liability.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
He makes a "christmas" tree, puts an 'X' on top instead as opposed to a cross, and refers to 'youtube' as "jewtube".
A few years ago, a friend of mine acquired a Sun RSM cabinet, fully loaded with seven trays of disks. He set up plaiding on it (RAID5 down in hardware, striping across in software) so that any significant write would access every drive in the rack.
On Christmas eve, he turned the lights down low and ran a full fsck on the volume. For hours, he had hundreds of green LEDs flashing on and off, heralding the Christmas spirit.
(I suspect he had a fair amount of Christmas spirits in him as well.)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Lame! How do I digg this down?
Pity reply.
I can't even see it... slash-potted Please seed!
...it's the only way to be sure.
and he responds in kind, He loves Christmas. :-)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
December 26th... time to run deltree
I guess you would at least have access to some logs ...
While you guys had me on pins and needles waiting for the next clever post, I think I'm going to leave.
Now that Slashdot has toasted the rest of his servers, he has some more hard drives to make ornaments out of.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Always wondered what a directory tree looked like in a physical form
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Click here. It's slow though, but the photographs are there. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My god... he's probably got enough magnets on his refrigerator to life a Pinto!
There are holidays other than Christmas, hence the plural form.
But who celebrates more than one? Because that is what you ask us to do, with the phrase "Happy Holidays". It's absurd to pretend it's anything more than dumbing down every actual holiday to placate some person upset at the thought that anyone might be happy for a reason beyond self interest.
If you really meant to wish someone happiness with whatever they are celebrating, at the very least you should say "Happy Holiday".
Frankly I say "Merry Christmas" to everyone, in the spirit that I want whoever I am saying it to to be happy on Christmas regardless of what they are actually celebrating. Is it so terrible to wish someone happiness for a day? Besides, "Merry" is a word far to underused these days. If you yourself only want to celebrate Winter Solstice, why not wish someone a War Winter Solstice or something along those lines? Why not say something that means something and comes out of celebration, rather than say something that means nothing and springs out of fear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait for your coworkers to gather around it and then fire it up. Now that's what I call an office prank.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
why is that site's icon giving me the finger?
How is it possible it only took 1 'nut' to build that?
What if you have access to a leaf node?
How did we go from DOD erasure to removing the platters to make a tree? The data could still be recovered in its current tree state!
Only if you traverse the tree.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Yeah, and who the hell hired that Bob Cratchit anyway...? Always bitching about overtime...bah...
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
Since the site doesn't want to cough up the actual image, we don't know where the tree is located. It might still be in the server room.
There seems to have been a problem with the database. Please try again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser. An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, whom you can also contact if the problem persists. We apologise for any inconvenience. aka The Slashdot Effect
nigelt.wordpress.com
And the error message also reads: "An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, whom you can also contact if the problem persists."
They're in for a surprise when opening their inbox tomorrow.
Simple christmas tree made out of wireless sensor network hardware:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9114468111694568337&hl=en
Using 22 MicaZ motes, one displaying a counter on the LEDs and broadcasting, the rest listening and displaying what they receive on their LEDs.
Sorry, running low on caffeine...going back to my cave now.
You mean your lair, right?
Have a 1.5 terabyte Christmas, everyone!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I'm always slightly aggravated by people who say, "I need to destroy the data on this drive, but I didn't bother to learn how well software wipes work, so I decided to ignore all of the known data and invent my own procedure based on what I think would be a good idea."
So. . , I decided to ignore all of the known data and invent my own procedure based on what I thought would be a good idea.
Removed ceramic platter. Applied hammer for about thirty seconds. Scattered the resulting handful of dust outside. If I'd wanted to increase the difficulty of data recovery, I suppose I could have destroyed two platters at the same time, but I only had one old drive to play with.
Also, I didn't call it a, 'Procedure'. I called it, 'Playing'.
But each to his own.
-FL
Oh SCSI tree, oh SCSI tree, How shiny are your plaaaaat-ters!
Redundancy, redundancy, how you protect your d444-t3rz!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
The crew of Skylab 4 used old food cans for their Christmas Tree. Here is an image from NASA image:
http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~7~7~35051~138918:Christmas-tree--created-by-Skylab-4
During the first gulf war in 1991, I seen Christmas trees made from old MRE bags.
dismantle, dismantled
I suggest that you can dismantle your cards instead.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The article is taking about performing a DoD compliant data destruction on this disks, rather than he has taken DoD disks and 'reused' them.
Good data destruction techniques are something that any company which values is IP or customer data will perform on a disk prior to disposal. Data desposed of in this manner cannot, in theory, be recovered.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
but he's dreaming of a wiped Christmas!
salvaged from the depths of the inter-tubes, working link with pics and videos from original thread http://spaceghost.orconhosting.net.nz/christmas.html
Salvaged from the internet - http://spaceghost.orconhosting.net.nz/christmas.html
You wouldn't happen to have some Ultra320 (internal and external) cables leftover, would ya?
Exactly. Taking the platters out of the drive doesn't alter the data on them at all. So, he's done less to protect that (worthless) data by turning it into a tree.
And DoD "erasure" is basically "destroyed with thermite"; any drive that has ever held classified data is physically destroyed, not erased. I will never get over people's blind stupidity over "data security"... zeroing the drive is more than enough to erase your data from all but about 10 people on Earth. Trust me on this one: Your. Data. Isn't. THAT. Valuable. (and to be honest, most of the stuff labeled "classified", isn't worth the effort either.)
Speaking of which, I have to go output my daily log.