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"Smash Your Hard Drive" To Fight Identity Theft
Will Do This For Free writes "BBC News has a story about the only fireproof way of safeguarding your personal information when dumping your old computer: 'It sounds extreme, but the only way to be 100% safe is to smash your hard drive into smithereens. [...] The more thoroughly the better.'
This sounds like so much fun that I almost feel like doing it right now. Let me press Submit Story first."
Throwing into fire is not enough, the magnetic domain on the platter is still there for highly technical team to retrieve. You have to melt the hard disk into liquid and stir thoroughly.
The problem is that modern hard drives do automatic defect mapping. The end result is that sometimes important data can be written to a sector, and then the drive will decide that sector is unreliable and map it out. That sector can no longer be accessed in any way. As a result you have a sector which contains data but cannot be wiped because the drive won't let you write there.
Flash memory is even worse since it does write balancing between all cells to PREVENT a failure of a sector, rather than deciding a sector is on its way out and mapping around it then.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
About a decade ago, our artillery unit did do "rollovers" on hard drives for the intel unit. The drives, although already drilled through, were stored in a safe and ecsorted by Military Police. After we ran them over, the pieces went back into the safe. After the drilling and crushing, the drives were to be put into a 55 gallon barrel (along with wood or paper), doused in fuel, and burnt for a minimum of 30 minutes.