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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.
Found the link to the actual picture via another site: http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/7811/tree14zq5.jpg
Stupid Ajax. Curse it!
and the link I was trying to post: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Pam5qLu8CwY
google cache
a) 15 drives isn't a lot.
b) If there were any volatile chemicals, they would have left long ago, by heating in an unsealed chamber (drives are NOT sealed to the air! If they were, the cases would rupture.)
c) If there were any loose chemicals, they'd have moved around in the case and screwed things up.
d) How deleted do you need your data? Do you actually know?
Realistically, you're looking at hard metals and hard ceramics. Are you eating parts from your hard drives? If not, then you've practically got nothing to worry about.
Sdelete can be quite thorough--far moreso than dismantling drives and bending platters. Specifically, "SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M..." Is that good enough for you? Do you know if it is?
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."
Ask the important questions: What is the sensitivity of the data (i.e. how would your life be affected by its compromise--identity theft? divorce? jail?) and what is the desirability of it (how hard would someone work to find it)?
If you're producing kiddy porn or selling state secrets, then both of those factors are extremely high, and you should be investigating thermite. If they're tax returns and account spreadsheets from the past 15 years, then sdelete is probably overkill if used correctly (which can only be done IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH!). Maybe you're a doctor with patient records--consider hiring a professional data destruction service.
Bending platters and wiping magnets across them is haphazard, undocumented, unreliable, and unlikely. The only reason to dismantle a drive is to scavenge the parts, not wipe the data.
As an aside, anyone with sensitive documents that would affect others (i.e. doctors) has a moral responsibility to learn a sufficient amount about this stuff to deal with it properly.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Is there a way to filter stories to cut out ones from individual editors?
Yes, it's in your system preferences.
Proverbs 21:19
Here's a copy of the picture: http://toolmans.blogspot.com/2008/12/xmas-platter.html
And in case that does something bad, Google cache: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ajUtxPi4cb8J:toolmans.blogspot.com/+http://www.nzgames.com/forums/showthread.php%3Ft%3D81672