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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!
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 Haven't seen a good set of Christmas ornaments or bling from outdated equipment for a while.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
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! --
Only if you have root access.
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
google cache
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.
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?
oops, wrong page. However, it will give you a photo of the tree.
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.
Would it really have taken too much effort to rotate the first video by 90Â? Pretty poorly performed.
Actually, most autistic kids stack things very neatly and precisely. So no need to further heap insults on autistic children by comparing them to this guy.
"Fortunately, I'm adhering to a very strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber..."
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!
Apparently jewtube.com is a real site ... doesn't seem to be anti-Semitic at first glance, duhno for sure though - looks like they have had a whopping 2 contributors to the main page, though ... either very small (and perhaps he was trying to draw attention to it) or more insidious that appears.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
And having it all in a tree makes it easier to search, too!
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.
This should go into the Idle section... lol btw nice crap
I can't call that English
Parent is not flamebait, the author actually wrote that in the article. It disturbed me, too.
And "megamerican" can please take his conspiracy theories elsewhere.
:wq!
I remember when:
It was easy to decorate with all the CDs from AOL.
There are holidays other than Christmas, hence the plural form. Back before Christians stole it, like they do everything else, the holiday was the winter solstice. It was a time of giving gifts and lighting candles.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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)
He has this ULTIMATE set of tools.
[citation needed] -love, Mom
What about all the dust that is generated from drilling it? I'd rather just disassemble it and bend it, and then toss it in the dumpster. Hopefully if someone comes across it, the platters will have been mangled enough to make the data unreadable.
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
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!
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
no chems to worry about except dust from the magnets if powdered and eaten.
really, though you have got to be trolling as no one is that paranoid who doesn't also have a reasonable grasp of the technology and cost benefit analysis.
Let's face it:
A simple dd 0 over a drive is sufficient for all the major recovery houses to say: "no can do"
If the government has the tech to recover that data anyway (which I would presume they have), it would be a time intensive affair. You have to be a very attractive target to worry about them spending the resources on you for that. Your local PD / state can't do that.
finally, if you really are that afraid of someone reading your disks then do the following:
buy a propane / mapp gas torch. Light it.
burn the platters till the CVD media peels away from the platter, or till it glows deep red, whichever comes first. Done.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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
You need to go buy a "Merry Whatever Offends Liberals" sweater! This particular PC crap pisses me off as well. Only the word "Christmas" is Christian, the holiday is far older, and there's no reason not to be merry about it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think it's an anti-hispanic jab, made by referencing their difficulty pronouncing "you". It just happens to look anti-semetic, but really, it's just anti-hispanic. Which is actually almost okay, because hispanics are almost white, and you're allowed to make fun of white folk.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I can't even see it... slash-potted Please seed!
Beowulf forrest?
Or would you start with just a glade?
I drank what? -- Socrates
...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
At least its an honest wish. Happy Holidays is a cop out. In an attempt to be "all inclusive" we basically shut everyone out and not even allow them to know what religion we are. I am Christian, I say Merry Christmas. I am including you in the joy of my religion's holiday, regardless of weather you wish to partake of the holiday, I am extending the invitation at least. I have Jewish friends, who I knew were Jewish, and I explained this to them the first time I wished the Merry Christmas, that I knew they were Jewish, and I hope they have/had a Great Hanukkah when it rolls around (or rolled around), but for now, its Christmas and I wish them the joy of this holiday. Several of them wished me a Happy Hanukkah, with the intent that they were being sarcastic, but I thanked them very much for the thought. I did not bother with a "I don't celebrate Hanukkah, I celebrate Christmas" I just took it for what it was, a wish for happiness during that particular time of the year. Naming the holiday includes others in your life, not naming it puts up a barrier between you and them, quite in contradiction to the intent of the phrase.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
yes they can do that legally, but it is practicality speaking, impossible.*
-nB
*unless that what the ~rimshot~ tag was for, in which case I fail it.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
And "megamerican" can please take his conspiracy theories elsewhere.
How is explaining why someone would call it jewtube a conspiracy theory?
Oh my, someone posted two links and made a connection between them. They must believe that the moon landing was hoaxed and that Elvis shot Kennedy on the grassy knoll!
I don't condone his use of jewtube but he has a right to his opinion.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Larry Page and Sergey Brin happen to be Jewish. In addition, YouTube recently responded to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League to remove content posted by Palestinian terrorists.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
I guess you would at least have access to some logs ...
Free time? More like TREE time. Har.
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).
fire them from a Rail gun into a concrete wall. Get the Drive wipe and catastrophic impact all in one neat, tidy package.
My god... he's probably got enough magnets on his refrigerator to life a Pinto!
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.
And therein lies the problem. Do you know how arrogant that statement sounds to a non-Christian? Not everyone wants your holiday or your holiday cheer, and it would be nice if more Christians respected that instead of demanding everyone be happy for them.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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)
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
And therein lies the problem. Do you know how arrogant that statement sounds to a non-Christian?
Less arrogant than someone willfully choosing to take offense because I wish them a single nice day?
Not everyone wants your holiday or your holiday cheer
Ok then Mr Grinch. I wish you nothing but a life of despair which I'm sure you'll take care to provide yourself. An odd choice, but one you seem adamant about.
I'm not even really religious, in the same way that Christmas is hardly a Christian holiday a this point. If you are going to cringe and melt at the very word "Christmas" then there is no placating your sensitivities and I frankly see no need to even try. To me you seem way more arrgant than you are claiming I am - so where's your sensitivity for MY feelings on the matter, eh?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, and who the hell hired that Bob Cratchit anyway...? Always bitching about overtime...bah...
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
No, you don't want a Beowulf forest, because then you have to worry about Grendel showing up.
Huh? Christmas is a pretty secular holiday for me. I celebrate it because it's fun to give thoughtful presents and receive thoughtful presents. I could care less about Jesus. "Happy Holidays" was used to wish a happy Christmas long before anybody had the idea that it should be a way of referring to non-christian holidays, too. Just a bunch of silly atheists* finding a way to make themselves relevant again.
*I'm essentially an atheist, as well. Don't get angry at me for ragging on atheists, get angry at weirdos who make a big deal out of other people not being atheists.
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!
25th of December was/is a pagan celebration.
It's just that the 'Holy Fathers' used it for JC's birthday.
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.
Pagans do.
It's also based on the equinox (Dec 22nd), but the pagans got it wrong....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
That would make it a glade server?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
but he's dreaming of a wiped Christmas!
Nobody's forcing you to celebrate Christmas, and if you really want to be miserable, well, please pardon people wishing you to be happy. It is a well-intentioned mistake.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.)
Ah, good, someone got it. :-)