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The Homemade Hard Disk Destroyer
Barence writes "All businesses have sensitive data they need to destroy when they replace PCs, but disposing of hard disks properly can be an expensive business. This has led one IT manager in the UK to come up with his own, homemade solution — Bustadrive. It uses a powerful 'hydraulic punch' to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable, and requires nothing more than a pull of the lever on the front — similar to a drinks-can crusher. PC Pro tested the Bustadrive, and also sought the opinions of data destruction companies as to whether the device was really as effective as hoped, or just a fun way to mangle a hard disk or two."
I'd just use my rifle and a few rounds of .308 Winchester (or .303 British, 7.5mm Swiss, 8mm Mauser, whatever). Problem solved...
If you really want to go low tech, a sledgehammer would do fine.
I have always preferred putting some 7.62mm holes through old hard drives at a distance of 50 to 100m. Just remove the electronics so you don't end up with circuit board debris all over and old hard drives make great targets.
Time to offend someone
I bet it takes less time to plug the machine in and boot off a CD than it does to open the case, remove the drive, and then smash it.
Not if you actually let the software RUN, it doesn't. Using DBAN on a 500 GB drive can take days, whereas this solution takes a few minutes at most. Your solution is only practical if you have one hard drive to destroy, and it is attached to a machine. The usual situation is the hard drive died and you replaced it with a good one, now need to make sure the dead one is REALLY dead before you toss it. Or, you have a batch of them that need to go because you're refreshing PCs.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Where I used to work (~5 years ago), we used an erasure tool that wrote random data over the entire drive (10 times), then introduced the drive to "Mr. Band Saw" in the machine shop, to quarter the platters, on any DoD/DoE stuff
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
A degausser weakens the magnetized regions, but it's still at least theoretically possible to read it if it's not done thoroughly enough. What I don't get is why you don't just take it apart and sand the platters clean. There's zero chance of reading it after that, and it's a lot less energy intensive than actually chunking the platters. Extra credit if you use the disk drive motor to spin the disk so that you can sand it without any actual effort...
You don't need to melt the platters. You just need to get them hot enough to no longer be magnetic - that is above the Curie temperature for the alloy, which will be somewhere around 200C or so. When the magnetic domains reform there is none of them to be in the same place as they were before with the exception of a few edges on grain boundaries. Get even hotter and you'll change the grain size or even completely change the crystal structure and get grains in completely different places and sizes when it cools down.
That means heating the whole drive for long enough that the platters get hot and not just heating the outside of the thing the drive is in for a few minutes.
You mean, after freezing and shattering it with liquid nitrogen?