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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 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...
Thats probably because you used some silly setting like Gutmann. Just use pseudorandom and be done with it. (esp since gutmann isnt really relevant anymore....)
:)
Pseudorandom wipe can apparently do an 80gb drive (hooked up via usb) in about 40 minutes.
If youre doing multiple passes, you may want to make sure that doing it via overwrites (rather than destruction) is really good enough for your data
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).
7.62mm seems like an unusual size for a drill bit, and what kind of drill are you managing to use at up to 100m? Seems like a longer distance than I've seen any normal pillar drill move over.
I do agree that not removing the circuit board causes lots of debris, though, and is especially dangerous when it spins off at an angle!
Well, if you like the kid, sure..
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.
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.
the topic is hard drive destruction, not sex.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Because for a system administrator, paranoia is a basic job requirement. Consequently, when it comes to data security, there's no such thing as too much overkill. Even when you have subjected the drive to a thermite reaction, let it cool, and ground the whole resulting mess down to the consistency of talcum powder, you still have to scatter the ashes over at least a thousand square miles of ocean, just to be sure. Ideally, you'd scatter half the ashes over the central Pacific, some of them over the north Atlantic, and the rest over the southern ocean.
Extra bonus points if you scrub the platters with fluorine trichloride before putting it through the thermite reaction.
Even then, you'll never be fully comfortable with the job until you destroy the entire galaxy that the drive was in. Maybe the whole universe. You can't be too sure.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Good safety advice! Never go close to kids without protective gear.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Just destroying the universe after the disk failed isn't enough. If many-worlds is true (and the paranoid sysadmin must consider this possibility), the fact that you destroyed the universe in this world doesn't guarantee that the data isn't destroyed in any other world. Indeed, you have to setup the universe-destroying device before writing the first bit of data onto the drive, and have it automatically triggered if it can't detect any accesses to the drive any more (after all, you might forget to activate it by hand in some of the universes). Only by setting it up before writing data you ensure that it will be in every universe where the disk contains any data, despite all the universe splitting going on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's the best way to get red wine out of cotton? This guy: Thermite.
Even if only one technician in the entire world, with a billion-dollar lab, is capable of recovering the data from a zero'd drive, it's too much of a risk. What if that one technician is Chinese?
Oh, that's ok, my data isn't written in Chinese...
You can't take the sky from me...
Just mark the drive 'fragile' and post it via CityLink (UK courier firm)... guaranteed that THAT data wont be seen again...
Mail it to yourself via registered mail and then refuse deliver. Once it enters the Post Office loop, it'll never be seen again.
Beside, just reformat a few times--first with reiser, then NTFS, then another Linux format, then whatever you want to use in the end. Pretty hard to unscramble all that.
It's easy to unscramble reiser. You just have to offer it a reduced sentence in exchange for telling you where the body is ;)
Thank you, I'll be here all night....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Note that there are two dimensions to security. One is how big a problem it is if the secret leaks, the other is how long this is true for. Troop movements in Iraq, for example, could cost lives if they are leaked today, but if they are leaked next month then the data is irrelevant. The NIST recommendations that suggest destroying the drive are based in the principle that the secrets may be important in 20-50 years. They factor in attacks that are hypothetical now, but could become practical over this timeframe. For a commercial entity, this level of paranoia is rarely required. Most businesses don't have any data that would be a problem if it leaked even 5 years in the future - even credit card numbers have a shorter lifespan than that, so if someone recovered a five-year-old list of credit card numbers they wouldn't get anything of value.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.'"