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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.
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.
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 Haven't seen a good set of Christmas ornaments or bling from outdated equipment for a while.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?
google cache
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?
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!
And having it all in a tree makes it easier to search, too!
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!
Well I would ... but it's completely slashdotted.
Wouldn't it have been a lot easier to put the proper pic instead of that green thing.
No sig today...
We'll need a solution to the traveling reindeer problem to figure that out.
He has this ULTIMATE set of tools.
[citation needed] -love, Mom
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...
I take 'em to the rifle range... not much can be recovered after a bunch of 30 caliber holes appear in it...
You'd be surprised at the lengths to which the RIAA will go to gather evidence.
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
boo!
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
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!
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!
Thanks for your input, I didn't realize they weren't vacuum sealed, but you make a great point about air expansion.
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
What if I do a dd on my drives, throw them out, some dumpster diver picks them up, uses it for kiddie porn, then forgets about the drive. 5 years from now, someone happens to find the drive, gives it to the FBI, the technology advances to the point where they can somehow recover my TurboTax documents that were supposed to be deleted but actually weren't. They will come knocking on my door, take me down for questioning, and my reputation is ruined.
It's the exact same reason why I have zero presence on the Internet with my real identity. Data is forever. People could get screwed by it's misuse, and I don't want to be one of them. I don't need to apologize for being overly cautious. This isn't the 1950s anymore, you need to use different measures to protect yourself. 10 years ago, people would have laughed at you for shredding your documents with a crosscutting shredder. Now it's standard practice. I think people should treat all their information the exact same way.
Remember kids, when you have the opportunity to make a funny about SCSI, you have to LUNge at it.
Be relentless!
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!
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
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
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)
No, you don't want a Beowulf forest, because then you have to worry about Grendel showing 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.
but he's dreaming of a wiped Christmas!
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
If you're really that paranoid, why don't you just keep the drives around after you SDelete them? 15 drives really don't take up much space, even less so if you reduce it to just a stack of platters and get rid of the other bits. That way, you don't have to worry about anyone scavenging the drives from a garbage dump somewhere. And besides, keeping them around could mean burying them in your yard and pouring a concrete porch over them. I would say that's pretty secure.