Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why not just use a degausser? or DBAN?
I use a hammer, then I pee on it.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/06/189248
I just use a stand drill. I goes through all the platters and the circuitboard.
Fairly easy to find and purchase.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Just give the hard drive to your kid with a hammer, tell them to go nuts, come back 10 mins later with a dustpan and brush and you are sorted.
Sounds like you could fix it with... Pops-a-dent!
Jokes aside, from the FA: "The Bustadrive, then, looks like itâ€(TM)ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
So what they're saying is, this doesn't do the job as well as something like one of those DOD disc scraper/shredder things, but it is more fun, which I guess makes it news worthy?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
My drill press makes for a very effective drive killer.
Use what you got!
pending committee review
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
As the RTF states, data can be re recovered, given a financial budget & time.
But I wonder. I posed the same question to a buddy awhile back, and he suggested baking the disks in an oven at 250 degrees C for an hour. The idea being that well, yeah, sure the magnetic platters can theoretically be recovered given time, budget, and determination. But still, the printed circuit board, etc. would be melted and thus ruined. Seems just as sensible, and more cost effective given readily available tools, (and sufficient ventilation!!!)
Nuke your old hard drive from the orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
By destroying the drive, you make it so that the drive cannot be re-used. Why not just secure erase the entire drive? 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. Isn't there some free software that you can use to securely erase all the data on a drive with minimal effort?
I think it would be easy to melt the disk into a nice puddle of slag, what might be harder is not burning the building down in the process.
I keep wondering why do people keep disks with unencrypted data. I have all my disks encrypted with AES and I'm not worried when my laptop or server needs to be serviced.
BTW, I had some disks with very confidential data. I decided to make a nice big bonefire. We had both hot sausages, cold beer and safe data :-)
Raise the drive to the curie point. All magnetic domains are destroyed, and recovery is impossible with currently known methods.
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
250C would destroy the PCBs, but I'm not sure whether or not just swapping them out would yield a readable drive.
Hence the 'more than $10' comment. Thermite is a piece of piss to make and you would probably use less than $1 of it to destroy a hard drive. The cost would be the pit you would need to build, outside of your office building, where you could carry out the cremations.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
to throw the hdd into hot, molten lava.
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
Wipe the drive with software. Do it several times with different programs if you're paranoid. Set up an assembly line to do it if you have many, with each individual responsible for a separate step. Test drives prior to re-release.
People are so badly mistaken about how recoverable disk data is: they believe the same way they believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. What a waste of good work.
Not a chance. Once it goes above the Curie temperature it isn't magnetic anymore and when it cools down the magnetic domains are going to be arranged in completely different ways. Bullets, explosives etc also work since a shock wave through the material can raise the temperature at the wave front up to as high as the Curie temperature - which means it's not magnetic when the wave goes through and the magnetic domains that for afterwards have no reason to make them reform in a similar pattern.
There has been speculation that magnetic dust could settle on the surface and mark where the magnetic domains were but that doesn't really sound likely since the drives spin.
A ball pean hammer applied vigorously to the drive spindle will render all but the most wealthy and determined effort to recover data fruitless and even then it is highly unlikely that all or even most of the data would be recoverable.
The method is not at all eco-friendly - there's the wasted disk. It could potentially be used by others if you simply used something like Eraser or DBAN (which wipes data to beyond recovery by most means)...
Life is too good to waste... Read!
There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.
Don't encourage him. :/
you had me at #!
I have an oxy-acetylene torch in my home workshop. I've used it to turn platters into molten slag.
it's cheap too!
Gone!
This is not effective, I've successfully recovered drives where the PCB had been smashed, broken, etc. You just need to find the same model and replace with that.
Here is an easier method (version that may make from work).
There are commerical version that do alot better bending job, try http://www.garner-products.com/ for videos and pictures to gladden your hard drive destroying heart.
Why not just turn it up to 400 degrees and totally melt the platters? No way they're recoverable then.
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.
He'll need a hotter furnace (Curie temperature for iron is over 700C)...
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
Mod parent up. The board is not where the data is and replacing the board with a good one or swapping the disks into a case+board that is good is a common practice.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I disposed of some old hard drives a few months back. I wiped all of them (not just formatted) but I wasn't satisfied. I found that a breaker bar (a large iron bar meant to break up rocks) performed well. Just hold the bar over the drive and let it drop - repeat. The IBM deskstar was truly easy to destroy - the casing deformed quickly and the platters literally shattered into hundreds of pieces. Quantum fireballs however were sturdy little beasts. I thought I had protected the surface of my garage floor but I found that the breaker bar pushed the hard drive through the cardboard protection and into the garage floor... oops. Eventually the casing opened and I was able to use pliers to tear the platters. Yes it was all overkill - but it certainly was satisfying. :)
Will it blend?!
If the thermite is on top of the drive, it won't just heat the outside; it will rapidly melt the outside then fall into the interior of the drive. Thats the point. Youtube abounds with vidoes of thermite burning down through car engines, and hard drive cases are a lot less substantial.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Looks like someone did a 'hydraulic punch' on their web server...
This is my United States of whatever.
Interesting, this is in support of the guy who advocated putting a bunch of drives in an oven at 250C for an hour or so as a method of destruction; of what has been suggested so far, this just may be the easiest, most reliable, most practical effectively "safe" method.
Don't forget to play the Terminator theme as you drop the hard drive into a pool of molten metal.
In the HD but some of us would like to retain a usable HD after the job is done as donating the PC's to the 3rd world is much nicer and cheaper than trying to conform with all the Gubment regs for recycling/scrapping them. Now obviously DBAN will work but what about degaussing will that screw up the pcb? Are there any other easy options that won't take ages to run?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The hard disks used to be called Winchester Drives (I vaguely recall IBM made a dual platter disk drive 30MB capacity on each platter, and allegedly Winchester 30-30 was a well known rifle and so the drive was named Winchester drive too), after a famed rifle. Well, it would be poetic justice to put a hard disk out of misery using its namesake.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
ah, vice grips and mechanical punch machines: all are very large, noisy, and expensive.
try simply opening the drive and putting some sand in there. turn the drive back on for a few minutes and voila you have hard drive puree.
much more affordable, smaller footprint, and assured destruction!
just send royalties back to me if you use my method :-)
you first saw it on /.
...shreds the drives for free. Literally SHREDS the drive into tiny pieces, which fall into an enormous box full of other tiny pieces. You even get a certificate.
My understanding is that they resell the raw materials.
Whatever the case, it is both cheaper and more effective. You should look into it...
1) Place drive in computer ;)
2) Host website on said computer
3) Post link to website on slashdot
4) one melted drive
Over temperature might not correspond to data bit temperature for a very long time. If, for example, materials on the platter or elsewhere on the hard drive ablate they could keep it below the Curie temperature for quite a while. This is just speculation of course, I have no idea what hard-drive platters have on them - but I don't think its as simple as dialing an oven above the Curie temperature and then assuming the jobs done after X hours.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I live close to a kiln used for glass-blowing. How cool would it be to have a glass ornament with metal swirls of 1's and 0's?
Loading...
Wouldn't need a pit, just a good solid terracotta pot :)
Your aim is not to melt the whole drive, just punch a hole in the top of the drive casing, pour in a small amount of thermite and a small burning wick.
As pointed out, you don't need to melt the thing, just cook the platters to 1,000C or so to make the iron non-magnetic.
...
Garner-Products has been making drive crushers and degaussers for years.
They make a drive press that can fold multiple drives in half, good times!
No sig here...
Does anyone know what the Curie temperature of the magnetic coating happens to be? I would think that a potter's kiln or a blacksmith's forge would be effective.
Yes, but my point is you don't have to actually get it that hot and could use an oven. That is of course less fun. Explosives will also work if that induces a shock wave through the platters. The wave front is likely to heat things up enough that large crystals become small and the magnetism is long gone before the small crystals form. When I did this sort of stuff with iron pellets I had a really big air gun (10 foot barrel by 1 inch bore) instead of explosives, but hitting them with things at mach 1 did the trick.
Liquid metal (like the thermite) is of course a very corrosive thing and easily flows into any gap let alone melting it's way in. Even spilled mercury on an aircraft is likely to do some damage as it gets into the smallest crack and widens it.
Case in point -- I had a hard drive suffer a mechanical failure which prevented me from being able to read much of the disk -- enough to know that at least some of the data remained intact. This being the case, I don't know how reliable an attempt to write data (zeros or random data) would be. However, it is quite likely that much of the data on the platters remains perfectly intact, and would be accessible if one had the equipment to pop open the drive, and replace the failed read/write head.
In a situation like this, bet your ass the drive needs to be thoroughly and physically destroyed.
Complete annihilation means its easier to verify destruction of data (Is hard drive a liquid? Yes/No). Its also a morale booster, seeing as most people with the skills to fill up your hard drives with incredibly valuable data are generally total pyromaniacs.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Just cook the drive on the grill for 15 minutes or so. The heat should demagnetize the drives. You might want to watch out for toxic fumes though.
Good point, so use some extra.
A good tip is, if there is burning melted iron pouring out the top of the hole you make, the drive ain't recoverable ;)
...
You dont have to melt the whole thing, you just have to make sure that the drive exceeds the curie point at some point.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
To be really sure though, I would have thought its best to put as much distance between the Curie temperature and the temperature of your heat source as possible. Hence thermite - pretty much the cheapest and easiest way of getting 4 digits of centigrade.
Also, you've touched on the main reason for thermite: FUN :)
Data destruction is usually something that occurs at the end of a project. Why not celebrate your success with some massive overkill against your old drives?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Which would be the better solution.
A small terracotta pot without a hole in the bottom of it + a small amount of thermite is the cheapest way, thermite is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out.
Even if we did it outside at my place of work, we'd get complaints from the neighbors. A mechanical/hydraulic crusher/bender thing could be made into something that looks like an office appliance.
Nothing says "no data recovery" like a drive reduced to its elemental components.
Except it's not. Burning is generally a process of rapidly combining reactants, not dividing them up. Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly - having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
Putting moderation advice in your
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
Then use a $20 walmart toaster oven. I have always meant to try this on a running hard drive. Thought it might make an interesting science fair experiment. Main problem seems to be melting the USB cable before the drive fails.
In the military I was informed that they simply used a cutting torch, no muss, no fuss, no thermite steam explosions. I was also informed the main problem was to breach the case ASAP before pressure builds up inside, as the drive air filters won't vent quickly enough, so the first job w/ the torch was to blow out the drive shell by the air filter. Large installations (NSA?) simply used a ultra heavy duty recycling shredder and they weighed what came in must equal at least 90% of what came out the other end.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Hence the 'more than $10' comment. Thermite is a piece of piss to make and you would probably use less than $1 of it to destroy a hard drive. The cost would be the pit you would need to build, outside of your office building, where you could carry out the cremations.
The article is about something built in the UK. Our population density is fairly high, I'd need to drive several miles to find anywhere appropriate and in this town the average traffic speed is about 6-8 mph.
Rule 37: There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload'.
A lot lower for alloys so it really depends on what it is. If we assume it's pure iron and a decades old drive then you are correct but small traces of other alloying elements have a dramatic effect (eg. for most stainless steel it's below room temperature in the extreme example).
There's a discussion at http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-454159.html of a few different magnetic materials used in drives and Curie points with a few links to where they got the source data from.
You probably don't need more than 500C, maybe a lot less depending on the material but it could still be out of the range of a domestic oven. A gas torch of some kind would easily do the job, and yes thermite is even going to melt the things beyond any sort of magnetic recognition.
Let me pull a bugtraq posting from 2005 out for perusal. There are other interesting tidbits in that thread too.
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Jul/0464.html
===
From: dave kleiman
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:30:30 -0400
Here is a quote directly from Peter I received Saturday, he asked to have it
passed on to the list.
-Snip-
>I'd love to hear some thoughts on this from security and data experts
>out there.
People should note the epilogue to the paper:
Epilogue
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the
35-
pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo
incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis
of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the
voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect
than
a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass
overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios
involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers
everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that
statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses
encoding
technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you
never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a
few
passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A
good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected".
This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing
data
density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and
use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that
anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps one or two
levels via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the the
drives
in use at the time that this paper was originally written have mostly
fallen
out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-
density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-
density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and
can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able
to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces are
close to zero.
Peter.
===
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
This brought to you by the same people who worry about md5 encryption not being good enough yet just have to leave the telenet process running, oh and they gotta have p2p apps installed on their top-secret hacker proof networks too...
Please... Anyone who has kept up with the news in the last 20 years knows that this sort of data is stolen the easy way. Someone plugs in a thumb drive, hacks your wireless network or adds a packet sniffer. The only times it comes up that information was taken from an old drive is when that drive wasn't wiped at all or was in a lappy that got snatched...
No one who really needs/wants your data is going to wait to steal your old wiped disks just hoping that 'Dr. NO' can recover the data.
Physically destroying a perfectly good drive is wasteful and foolish. You're not making your data any more secure. You're just doing it because that's what you where taught and you believe it's necessary without really thinking about where the real problems are because those problems are much harder to deal with.
I really don't know where my tired brain got the 200C but I remember it as part of a beer fueled discussion with other engineers on the topic of destruction of hard drives. There was one magnetic material used in drives that this applied to but I'm not sure what is being used now.
Why not just use a degausser? or DBAN?
The answers are cost and speed, respectively.
A degausser strong enough to quickly and effectively erase today's high density hard drives costs quite a bit of money. One that can do one drive after another without a lengthy cool down period can cost thousands of dollars.
DBAN takes hours per drive at best.
A mechanical crusher such as the one described in the article is quick, effective and cheap. It can be used repeatedly with your arm strength as the only limitation. And, if that gets to be too much, you could use an electric motor to power it, rather than you arm.
Think of the problem from a business perspective where you are trying to wipe/destroy numerous drives in a session, rather than the single drive from your home PC.
Destroying 100 hard drives is a big and time consuming job with degaussers and DBAN. With a crusher, it's only a few minutes.
I've passed neodymium magnets over magnetic media and been able to read them afterward. A TV degaussing coil rendered it "unreadable" but just how unreadable, I don't know. I'm sure DBAN is effective but not all disks can be erased by DBAN. I have an older SCSI DBAN can't write 1's too. Grinding the disk into dust is the only way be 100% sure.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I call it a BFH-10000. A Big Fuckin' Hammer (weighing 10 kg).
Thor would be so proud.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You can be sure the drive has reached the Curie temperature when it has melted into a glowing pool of metal. Apply thermite liberally.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Mail it to yourself via registered mail and then refuse deliver. Once it enters the Post Office loop, it'll never be seen again.
what about using dd ? dd if=/dev/zero of=
'nuff said
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gandolf should just have handed the ring over one of the eagles, eagle flies off to Mt. Doom and disposes of the Preciouss while the Nazgul are looking for Frodo, nearly three volumes of tedium no longer need to be read.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One screwdriver is usually all that's needed. Extract discs, rub firmly with fine glasspaper, break or bend with lump hammer, label and store in drawer for future reference. I find it takes about 5 minutes. Your co-workers may appreciate the drive magnets to amuse their kids.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite i figure what a half pound or so should do the trick
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out
charred corpses don't terminate jobs
Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly
data processing including the manufacture and operation of hard drives is already environmentally unfriendly, and oxidizing metals is one way to get them back toward the more natural state for this world
Comment removed based on user account deletion
has anyone tested how readable a drive is after its been in the microwave for a little while?
I think it is generally recognised that the recovery cost for a bent platter would be huge.
The environment where this would be useful, e.g. a PC shop is going to have a large bucket of these bent drives.
The bad guy/gal with the mega budget is now going to have to staff the inside of the entire Hamalayas with white boiler suit clad minions to crack all of these on the off chance of finding the data pot of gold, or my facebook login.
The reality of the problem this addresses is the PC shop taking in customer PCs and not having the embarrassment of the customer's identity being cloned in Nigeria where the disk wound up.
I just tried it with an old and broken drive from a laptop of mine. Took a standards screwdriver, bent the protective casing away and took a stab at the drive platters. Turns out this particular one was ceramic ( or maybe it's some form of glass I can't quite tell ) and was easily broken. Now if I really wanted to I could dissolve the coating in battery acid or melt it or whatever, but quite frankly I doubt an attacker would bother trying to read data of the 10x10mm pieces that are left.
I use just a good old fashion drill, and run the bit through the platter 3 or 4 times. One time is sufficient to make it likly way to expensive for even the most serious person to recover anything. An extra 3 or 4 holes is just for fun.
Living in Chile
An air-acetylene torch works as well. just don't breathe the fumes.
Who needs safety when you have thermite ?!
Seriously, all it takes is a hammer and 5 minutes. Just put on some saftey glasses, take it out back, and go apeshit on it. Imagine it's someone you hate (you could even print a photo and tape it on) and go to town with the hammer. After some soild swings, give it a shake to make sure you can hear broken platters. Then hit it some more. I am sure some of the nerds out there could use a soild 5 minutes of pyhsical activity.
So basically baking in an oven would do it? Perhaps not the same oven you bake your bread in, there's some nasty stuff in those drives, I suppose.
Reduce - Buy the biggest disks you can afford, they're worth repurposing and you won't have to spend as much on successors or the attendant labor.
Reuse - Repurpose disks for other purposes. Use last years' disks as part of your backup solution. Secure-format them on a low-power machine and put them on eBay.
Recycle - There must be SOMEONE willing to break the drives down and give you back the platters for destruction. There's significant aluminum in some of those drives.
All this crushing, drilling, and shooting of drives is fun. But it's also extremely wasteful. I understand destroying the drives if lives are at stake, but otherwise, stop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Every now and then an article comes along that justifies my time spent on this website! This is one of them. A good article about destruction always hits the spot!@!
This seems silly. Why wouldn't you just zero out the drive once and be done with it? Does anyone here have a documented case of someone being able to recover data from a drive like that?
have you seen the challenge? http://16systems.com/zero.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method However, once the space is overwritten with other data, there is no known way to recover it. It cannot be done with software alone since the storage device only returns its current contents via its normal interface. Gutmann claims that intelligence agencies have sophisticated tools, among these magnetic force microscopes, that, together with image analysis, can detect the previous values of bits on the affected area of the media (for example hard disk). This has not been proven one way or the other, and there is no published evidence as to intelligence agencies' current ability to recover files whose sectors have been overwritten, although published Government security procedures clearly consider an overwritten disk to still be sensitive.[3] Companies specializing in recovery from damaged media cannot recover completely overwritten files
In fact, physical damage got more chances for recovery then simple DD. So why do you still want to use a device for that?
Seriously, everyone comes up with these elaborate schemes to physically destroy disks, as a means of destroying data. Let's say this one MORE time: Can your method provide with a consistent, known, and guaranteed level of data destruction?
Consider the terms I used here.
1) Consistent: Is this going to be the same for every drive?
2) Known: How much effort in terms of hours and dollars is required to recover some or all of the data?
3) Guaranteed: Oh, really? Prove it to me!
With a software wipe, you can calculate (and measure) residual magnetism, and also account for 'hidden' areas on the disk (recovery sectors, etc.) With a hardware destruction method, what can you guarantee me?
In fact, the gushing article from PCPro even shows the weaknesses of this method:
"The Bustadrive, then, looks like it'll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
Whereas, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge, a single random overwrite will wipe data beyond any hope of recovery. A pass with DBAN will wipe it completely out, and if you pay for EBAN support, you can even get a certificate guaranteeing the data destruction.
Why are people so determined to destroy disks, rather than data? Even worse, people are eager to PAY for questionable disk destruction methods, rather than just simply destroy the data--what they want gone in the first place.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
quick google for propane forge will be all you need. Those will even melt the Aluminum down and let you recast it into a shape of your choice.
I worked in a warranty department a number of years back - the best return we had was from a local law enforcement agency who used the drive for target practice.
The fact that you've never heard of accessing data after a Guttman 35 pass only proves that the people who can access the data are really good at keeping their process secret.
Spilling Mercury on an Aircraft is almost as bad as a bomb (except slower) Mercury speeds up the oxidization of Aluminum to the point where you can just about watch it fall apart, spill that on an aircraft and they'll likely ground it for a good long time while they strip to the base structure and make sure every bit of aluminum isn't damaged. Good 'before and after' pics in this article.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Either of these would easily melt the drive, a cheep gas forge will reach 2500f and a kiln usually closer to 4k
Every self respecting geek that i know, is using microwave ovens for destroying data. It works, and it's dirt cheap.
I use a .458 Win Mag for this job. 500 grain soft points at 2100 fps does a great job of mangling platters and spraying so much debris through a drive that the data is gone.
If only there were a way to wipe all the data on a drive and re-use the hardware... derrrrp! I guess throwing away stuff that can still be useful is the American way though, and this would be a fun toy.
Is this really news? I'm fairly sure that I've seen this before, though for the life of me I can't find a link to back it up... Maybe I saw it in a dream. Damn you IT manager in the UK! Stealing ideas from my dreams!
Error: No error occurred
I used a cast iron fireplace poker and shovel blade on two old drives in a pinch this weekend... wound up breaking the poker, too, though!
When we have to decomission drives, we just use a big shop vise.
Specifically, a McMaster-Carr P/N 4065A1, going for just $132.94
and in stock now.
It's also handy for crushing ... well, anything else. Or just
holding onto something while you do evil unto it.
And it doesn't just "bend the plate a little". It will easily squish the
entire drive. Lengthwise. Disk-drive aluminium is no match for
fifty pounds of nodular iron pushing high-carbon steel jaws.
You do want to do this over a wastebasket, especially for laptop
drives that use glass (not alumninium) disks. The shower of fine
glass shards is a pain to sweep up out of the carpet. DAMHIK
No, I am not making this up.
That's what I use to destroy drives, awful hard to recover anything from a molten lump.
Got Code?
if your woried about the data on an old drive simply dismantle the drive. The platers are fun for craft projects the rare earth magnets are fun toys. (cant swipe my data if i am useing it to keep my table clean)
There's something to be said for physical destruction. For example, thermite:
Consistent: Yes. Just cover the drive and let it go. There shouldn't be anything solid left.
Known: Obviously impossible to recover.
Guaranteed: I can absolutely guarantee that a pile of molten slag will not be recoverable. Do you disagree?
Or sanding off the magnetic layer:
Consistent: Yes, just make sure it looks the same. You can see the layer.
Known: There's no magnetism left on the platter...
Guaranteed: The data is dust. Bye-bye!
Both of those are somewhat faster than a DBAN, especially on today's sizes.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I for one will never forget the live demonstration by Patrick Norton on The Screensavers on TechTV of his first encounter with a glass-platter hard drive. Both he and his co-host, Leo Laporte were surprised at the shards of glass that flew out when he gave it one hit with a ball-peen hammer with enough force to dent a metal platter.
I don't think either of them were wearing eye protection at the time, but luckily neither were injured.
BTW, sandpapering-until-clear is more effective at destroying the data than a disk shredder. You can still reassemble a shredded or shattered disk with enough patience, but I'd say it's infinitely harder to reassemble the magnetic substrate (or reflective in the case of CDs and DVDs) when it's been reduced to powder.
Of course, you still want to eliminate any afterimages present in the on-drive buffer memory.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
drill then sledge hammer - about two minutes
..........FULL STOP.
MIght be more fun spearing the drive with that -as it as a better weapon for going thru plate armor
..........FULL STOP.
I suggest we start a Sourceforge project for such a device.
Let's name it Grand Obliterating Device, or GOD.
Or GNU's Obliterating device if you're a FOSS purist.
bjd
... will it blend ???
I take my damaged/unusable hard drives into a field and shoot holes in them, repeatedly. Effective and fun. You can even invite co-workers to help. Shooting hard drives is also a good way to use my old battle rifles. :)
I do work at a DOE site..
The current method is now an industrial shredder.. Nothing left bigger than a dime..
This goes for Hard Drives, Flash drives, cell phones.. Anything that can store data never goes out. till it's been through the shredder.
See one in action
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Try over 1000C. Hard drive platters use a cobalt alloy for the magnetic layer (according to Wikipedia), and the curie temperature of cobalt is 1121C, though it may be different for the specific alloy used. This is problematic because the melting point of the aluminum that makes up most of the platters is 660C.
Will it blend?
Why are people so determined to destroy disks, rather than data? Even worse, people are eager to PAY for questionable disk destruction methods, rather than just simply destroy the data--what they want gone in the first place.
Our method is simple.. If it does not look like a pile of shredded metal n chips it's not "clean"
There is no questioning if this drive had been wiped or not..
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
I dBAN drives, but for drives which won't spin up, or for clients who want physical damage to the media, I just drill a few holes through the platters. Cheap and efficient.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
Exactly what I would suggest. Disassemble the drive to what ever level you wish - take out the magnets, remove the circuit boards, whatever.
Take the drive platters + whatever bits of the drive are still attached to them, and place them in your self-cleaning oven.
Turn the oven on to a self-clean cycle.
Several hours later, when the oven has cooled off and unlocked itself, the patters will have hot-soaked long enough to have been well past the Curie point.
No more data.
AND you have a nice, clean oven (after a wipe down with a damp cloth).
www.eFax.com are spammers
Thermite? HELL YEAH!!! I can't argue with that one. :-)
I can't see how sanding the layer off would be faster than DBAN though, given that you've got typically six or eight surfaces inside a drive that you need to access. That's a lot of dismantling before you can do the sanding. Also, probably pretty low on the 'healthy methods' scale.
But fun, definitely. Both would be fun.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I use a Small Flamethrower, seriously, it was in the shed for killing moss on the patio.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Highly advanced technology from an alien culture left to my by my distant ancestors. It's called a hammer. But wait, there are better things to do with a defunct hard drive. Open it up for crimminy sake. It is full of super magnets and all sorts of other fun. In the process you'll destroy it and have a lot more fun.
Mod parent up, seems real to me, and very on topic.
Regardless of what everyone thinks here on slashdot, that is not good enough for some of us simply because it doesn't fall into the most recent standards we have to use at work. They use D.O.D. and also a couple other, more stringent. So.. ya I know, this will do most anything you want to clean: #dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdiskX //write zero's to the whole thing.
#tr '\0' '\377' /dev/zero | dd of=/dev/hdiskX //write 1's to the whole thing.
#dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdiskX //write a bunch of random stuff...ya I know.. If your using older versions of AIX, pre 5.2 for example and some other OS's you may not have a /dev/random... well there are other methods to do that.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
This is the contents of the special pack that the military used to destroy sensitive equipment. It was in some cases attached to the equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
It's trivial to set up a system so that even with Hotplug you can still trigger it.
http://www.engadget.com/tag/forensics
This small gadget can do a number of interesting tasks by itself and is very cheap. It has enough inputs and outputs to set up a variety of sensors and can even be used with Zigbee and GPS devices.
http://www.arduino.cc/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
So that is what happened to initech. They really should have fleshed that out more in the movie, it would have been a great subplot.
meh
As one of the comments in the article said, nothing is as much fun as a big hole punch and a mallet. That's what I use after we got tired of burning out drill bits, and all for under $20.
Wrong number. The right number would depend on what the actual alloy is. Properties of alloys differ a great deal from pure materials and one of those is usually a lowering of melting point and other transformations as you add other things - maybe this isn't a good example anymore but consider the mix of tin and lead in solder and how the solder melts at a lower temperature than pure tin or pure lead - hopefully most readers here got to see that in school. Neither pure cobolt nor pure aluminium is used because there are better things for the job. So the answer would be that the temperature would vary depending upon what magnetic material is on the platters. In one of my other comments there is a link to a few examples.
Every few months someone shows a new machine churning up hard disks by the hundreds because some idiot beauracrat (sp?) or 'security manager' has deemed them unsafe to ever be used for anything else.
It's nothing short of fucking disgusting.
We do not have the resources on this planet to be damned well putting things like this through a mulcher because of idiot paranoia.
I hope I don't need to tell anyone here that secure erase is not that difficult to do, this is wasting minerals and resources, money, time and it's costing the used disk market as well.
Furthermore it's normally government, rather than impliment the drive in another installation it has to be ground up.
It damn well sickens me.
Remove disks from case, put into hot pot, stir well.
It is interesting that just last week I decided to get rid of about 15 hard drives I had piled up. I used an old fashion axe. It is easier than the hammer, a single blow cuts through all layers. I hit them one by one. It did not require much effort, the axe cut right through the cover and platters. After I was done, I thought it would have been more fun to pile them up and try to whack as many of them as I could in a single blow, but it was too late :(
but will it blend?