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Ten Ways To Destroy a Hard Disk
Barence writes "Following his blog last week about the homemade hard disk destroyer, Bustadrive, Mike Jennings was deluged with comments from readers, both on the blog and here on Slashdot. Most seemed to like the product, but also offered up far more innovative and madcap methods of hard disk destruction, with a wide range of implements used — household and otherwise. In this follow-up post, he rounds up the best of an imaginative bunch of hard disk destruction methods."
Install Vista on it?
Write zeros. Once. Problem solved. Then you can sell the disk.
Physical destruction is only necessary if the disk is already broken, and you can't erase it properly.
The average welding torch, meanwhile, is a fully paid-up member of the "life-threatening but enormously enjoyable" club - and there's no denying that a 3,000-degree flame would reduce the average hard disk platter to a pool of reflective liquid quicker than you could say "data protection". It's a superb suggestion from Steve, who also put forward the angle grinder for consideration. We're worried about him.
A not as messy method might be a spot welder. They go by different names but my dad's shop used to have a nice adjustable Miller spot welder that would function great for sheet metal work. Anyway, I can envision a homemade spot welder (very trivial to make) with a stand around it and two wooden 2' by 2' pieces of plywood with a handle grip sticking up and two hard drive holes counter sunk with a quarter inch lip to hold each drive (for 3.5" and 2.5" drives). Place the hard drive in the selected hole and clamp your spot welder on it and go to town. Mark your initials in it and you should have a pretty solid drive with no mess, no metal shreds laying around, no flying debris or sparks and probably easier to store/recycle/transport. Man, I wish I didn't live in the city and had a wood and metal machine shop.
My work here is dung.
Run bit torrent on a hard drive continuously until it dies. Works every time.
If you have the harddisk out of the shell, buy 1 package of sparklers, if it's inside it, get around 4-5 packages (the metal sticks with grayshit on them)
Strip the grayshit (magnesium normally, if its something else it probably wont work as well through the case) and crush it into a powder off of all sparklers but 1, you can strip the last one down to about an inch or so from the tip. Pile it all on the harddisk/shell, light the sparkler tip that's left, insert into the pile, and other than it appearing as though the sun is arm's length in front of you for 5-10 seconds, anything underneath shall be melted/vaporized due to the white hot heat released. I've melted through steel grills at my local beach at night this way before, around 11pm 1 package of sparklers prepared this way lit up the local beach on long island sound for about a mile in all directions as if it was daytime.
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install Windows ME
I think the next list he needs to run is the top 10 stories that generated the most response from /. members. I bet a large majority of them involve coming up with creative ways to destroy things, including hard drives.
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Is to slowly destroy them physically. Back in the day we convinced our clueless boss that all drives had to be completely disassembled to prevent data theft; so we sat around when we were bored taking apart drives. We used the magnets, well, as magnets. But the electric motors were awesome! You can hook them up directly to power for a full on motor, or you can try to keep the drive in tact enough to still hook it up to the computer. Combined with some software (can't remember now) we were able to control the rpms and spin up of the disks. Made a great desk fan (ok actually you could buy a better one for 5 bucks than our hacked up version) or simply a good way to scare the crap out of someone when they sit on your desk.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
1) .45 caliber 1911 style handgun (gets the job done)
2) .357 magnum revolver (gets the job done with a louder bang)
3) 10mm auto handgun (gets the job done and lets you pretend to be Ted Nugent)
4) .44 magnum revolver (gets the job done and lets you pretend to be Clint Eastwood)
5) 9mm handgun (gets the job done and lets you pretend that you have a real gun ;)
6) 12 gauge shotgun (gets the job done and looks/sounds really cool)
7) .30-06 rifle (REALLY gets the job done)
8) .50BMG rifle (useful if you run into a hard drive with armor plate)
9) .22LR plinking rifle (gets the job done in a cost effective manner)
10) .223 fired from an AR-15 (gets the job done while scaring the crap out of any nearby big city types that assume any black rifle with a pistol grip is a weapon of mass destruction)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Everyone knows drives are most vulnerable when the heads are engaged, and the spinning platters should cause a single destructive action to potentially spread to the entire circumference. Why not do a write operation to the entire disk and hit it with a hammer during the write? Do that properly and the heads should go flying off in pieces into the platters, and the platters spinning with the loose head material should ensure nothing survives.
-bugg
You can turn them into art. I was at a local monthly thing that has booths where various types of hippies sell art or make you sign petitions to legalize marijuana, and someone was selling disc drives that had been shot, warped, or half-melted. He had turned them into clocks and other forms of useful art. It was really cool, and it allowed me to see the kind of damage some of the things on this list would do.
I have a friend whose brother is a locomotive engineer, so whenever I have a bunch of drives to destroy, we head for the railroad yard when the brother works the night shift (no bosses at that time), and we merrily lay down the drives on the track, and the brother brings along his engine we watch the crunch crunch crunch crunch action. His brother can enjoy the action too, as the engines are remote controlled (like toy cars)...
And after you shred the disk with the blender, don't forget to try to return it to get your money back.
Give it to my sister. If her laptop and last five cell phones are any indication, it'll end up with vodka dumped on it after a party or smashed to pieces in the middle of the street or even at the bottom of a toilet in a club. You would never believe how frequently that last one happens.
... aw, who am I kidding, this is Slashdot.
I swear jean designers are in cahoots with cell phone manufacturers. Just slip your hard drive into the back pocket of a girl in a night club wearing tight jeans
My work here is dung.
1 - The classic hammer
2 - "What's wrong with an angle grinder?"
3 - The average welding torch
4 - weaponry, from 12-gauge shotguns to high velocity rifles
5 - Science fans will be pleased to see an electromagnet on the list
6 - use a drill
7 - Hard disk platters are generally made from aluminium, which melts at 660.32C
8 - Electric log splitters
9 - An industrial shredder
10 - Finally, another method that scores valuable points for science: Thermite
'Nuff said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCWLpRc1yM
A Human Right
1. buy rare earth magnet. 2. play with magnet. 3. place magnet in pocket. 4. sit down and put macbook on lap. 5. call apple support. 6. tell technician "err it no work" 7. write good review of apple support.
Why not just toss them in a bucket of water for a few months?
Sent from your iPad.
I can confirm that this works.
...
Even if destroying the drive wasn't intentional. Sigh.
That's the only way to be sure.
Ezekiel 23:20
... which is to grind the device into dust, carried out entirely under supervision with all employees holding top secret clearances. I don't know where the dust then goes, but I doubt it's out of the country.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
1st of all ya gotta salvage the cool and powerful magnets then the platters are pretty easy to destroy.
ideopath @ play
When going through higher education I was originally aiming for a career in IT but half way through decided I didn't really fancy sitting at a desk all day. Becoming a plumber has definitely been the best decision I ever made, I get to work with really cool tools every day, plus I'm at the top of my profession having started plumbing about 6 years ago. I'm one of only 3 people qualified at my level in Mid Wales, and so am in incredible demand. I mainly work on servicing/maintenance on commercial/industrial heating and ventilation systems and see some incredibly cool tech every day. Sorry to brag, but as a self confessed geek, I have to say, plumbing is freaking awesome!
Kinda off topic, sorry about that. I don't often have any connection with anything posted on /. but like to read about it anyway.
My favorite way to ensure all data is lost on an hard disk is to store the only copy of my Master's thesis on that drive.
If you still have a copy of Windows ME you could try installing it. It killed a hard disk I had better than a bullet.
It seems to me you really only need one: Mossberg.
And lo it did come to pass that the frustrated IT geek spaketh "Go ahead, make my day", as they prepared to dispense final judgment upon the failing storage device. And there was a joyous noise and the bits and pieces were taken up unto the Lord in his mercy. Amen.
Thus ends the reading from the book of Jobs.
The Digital Sorceress
My current manager enjoys dismantling the hard disks after rather stressful meetings. I think anything after that is just fooling around. You would have to be seriously good at figuring out the sector information for that disk to get anything useful and even then its likely been ruined by dust and other platters in the pile.
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So a blog post gets a /. mention. Then the blogger summarizes the /. comments into a top-ten list (and a quick perusal suggests it's just a copy-and-paste job of the +5 comments, no new information added) and submits this summary as another /. story and gets those recycled comments accepted?
A rather cheap way to drive up page hits, IMO.
Unfortunately, the first drive I opened was an old IBM DeskStar. I had forgotten what DeskStar drive platters were made of...
One swing and I had to call a halt to the whole operation while I swept a metric buttload of treacherous fragments of shattered glass up off my kitchen floor.
I conducted the rest of the destruction outside, near the Dumpster.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
at http://www.watchitshred.com/ Perhaps the most impressively physical set of videos I've ever seen.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Apparently, asking the Best Buy staff to install a new video card will work pretty well.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
All I can say is that we're lucky the arrow of time only goes one way because the math says that no matter how much you smash the damned thing you can always put it back together. Thus it might be worth investing in a crab or two to eat a couple pieces of it (a cookie of you know the story).
10 ways to destroy a hard-drive: 1 - Drill-bit through center plate 10 - Bustadrive
Use Windows.
Sincerely,
K. Trout
Take the hard drive cover plate off exposing the platters. Fill it with a small amount of sand. Not too much or the platters will not turn. Then take it and power it up for an hour or until it quits. The sand will be an abrasive on the platters cleaning them of any data.
coffee
Simplest solution, use the internal Secure Erase command in the hard disk itself as specified in the ATA standard,
your drive will take care of everything for you, also erasing any potential blocks that has been marked as bad:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
Hey, rather than find a way to reuse a complicated piece of tech, lets play like cavemen and come up with awesome ways to break it so no one can do anything with it.
Sure, some data is too valuable to risk, but it is 2009, you would think we would have a non-physically destructive way to securely erase data rather than a hammer.
The scope of the pure wastefulness of this is just sick. Yeah, I'm probably in a minority, but this logic is why our landfills leach out heavy metals into the water table.
America used to be resourceful and frugal.
See the "TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit" post from August 2nd: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/02/1653256/Orbit-Your-Own-Satellite-For-8000?art_pos=8
http://bit.ly/grdxX
A similar concept to yours, pressing a silicone button on the drive breaks open a sealed capsule of silica sand into the HDA; this would most certainly scrub any magnetic film from the rotating disks. And during its self destruction, it would attempt to rezero and seek, sure to polish most every data surface and thoroughly destroying the heads .
I just destroyed two drives yesterday.
After throwing them 20 feet in the air (repeatedly) and watching them bounce, I realized that the platters still hadn't shattered - darn, they must be aluminum. (Deskstars are easy to destroy like this. They make pretty sounds with all the tinkling platterparts inside - like a rainstick.)
So I took them into the tool shop, cut about halfway through them with a chop saw (glorified angle grinder), then clamped them into the vise, and struck them with a hammer.
The result is that the cast aluminum chassis of the drive is cracked in two, and the platter (old, low capacity drives with a single platter) has a big notch cut out of it, and the rest of it is hopelessly warped.
Yes, these were with disks with errors. DBAN no effect.
I've found the only consistently reliable way to make a hard drive fail is to overload it with cherished porn.
.. discovered the fastest way to destroy a hard drive. It was to put the only copy of his PHd. dissertation on one.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Hmm, i don't think it will work so well on modern drives but we had an old hard disk from our mini computer turn itself into a metal lathe one night. Came in the next day to find a whole room full of aluminum shavings. Shredded several of the 11" platters into nothingness. After the pieces went through the fan nothing was more than 1/8 x 1". At least everyone understood the value of the offline backup.....
Very effective data destruction however it was a tad messy after it blew about a million aluminum curly-Q's all over the place.
The part even harder to picture these days....they repaired the drive!
Most of the new stuff is probably too hard to convince to destroy itself nearly so well :(
I thought the easiest way to ruin your hard disk was to install Windows on it.
They could enlist the help of a data recovery company to test the feasibility of recovering data from the drives in question.
Could include SSDs for good measure.
Now obviously they'd try out violence (hammer, grinders), thermite, various weapons and explosives, but it'd be interesting to see their take on it, even if the 'simple' ways (like wiping and electro magnets) hardly make for good TV (let alone fast with wiping).
Even a "here's the quickest way to erase everything securely" bit would be fun.
I mean - it is a myth that you cannot securely erase data with a single wipe.
Install Microsoft Vista
No, it's true! As a forensic specialist, give me a disk that has been overwritten with zeros, and I can recover approximately 50% of the bits that were on the disk before it was wiped.
Yeah, the zero bits. But the good stuff is in the zeros and ones.
I use my drill press to drill a 1/4" hole thru some of the chips and the platters.
Anyone who wants to spend enough to get anything off of it after that is happy to do so.
For a load of corporate data a couple of holes would probably do it. After that it would be easier to burglarize you and get a live disk or machine with the data on it.
only way to be sure
Microwaves create pretty sparks while they're destroying electronics. Hence they are the best.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
They're using their grammar skills there.
... Install Vista on it.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOIf0JmZfrQ -> Here is an example of the average welding torch... I posted this link last time too if you have a sand mold ready you can cast a beer opener too!
Please please leave the lists on Digg where they belong and concentrate on News.
-- Cheers!
Well, not totally destroyed, but shooting one with a .54 cal Hawken style muzzle loader is an awful lot of fun... http://www.teknoviking.com/?p=83
..but ANY excuse to play with thermite and high-powered rifles, ya know? Stop trying to ruin the fun, OK? :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
1. Remove drive from computer
2. Dismantle drive, remove platters and magnets
3. Use magnets for interesting things
4. Either: Use platters for interesting things, or: Destroy platters (bending them up works well)
Cost: essentially nothing.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
thats it. /dev/random but it will take a really long time.
you could use
widest possible dispersion?
This much discussion and not a single link to the IDE Killer (scroll about halfway down)?
One up the little kids putting the penny on the rail tracks . This should pretty much destroy it. If the train destroys it, the fireball should do the rest.
This was the first one. And the second one follows now:
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You just cut out the back, Jack
Put it in a pan , Stan
You make it into alloy, Roy
Just format your C:
Use the degauss, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just lose the private key, Lee
And get yourself free
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Step 1) dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446
Step 2) Turn off Computer
Step 2) Curse loudly, as you realize you just dd'ed the wrong drive, and lost all your data.
It just overwrites the partition table. Virtually instant. Make sure you put in the right drive.
Though your data is not te
I use DBAN if the drive is still good _AND_ I know where it is going (say - another PC at the same company). But I had a batch of small 20 GB IDE drives that were not worth the effort of DBAN'ing. I had a lot of them so the hammer method was out.
Took them to the tool room and clamped them into a power saw. Cut the entire batch in half in about 8 seconds. Fun to watch, too. I am pretty sure there will be no data recovery off those puppy's.
I guess I could do both if I _really_ had to be sure.
Place nail here >+
My favorite method is to first yank the heads off(or bend them away a bit) so that they don't "crash" and stop the fun.
Then dump a handful of powdered glass or sand into it, close it up, and run it until the main bearings seize. Sand-blasted and absolutely impossible to recover. Also makes great noises while nuking itself.
My 10 year old daughter invented this last winter, hydraulic punch and all. There's a photo and everything.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/dailystar/283776.php
1. Thermite. Flame big. Fire good. Drive gone.
2. Give it to Mythbusters. Big boom, problem gone.
3. Murlatic Acid. Etch that puppy!
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Damn. Torx set, plus a bandsaw always works for me.
Hans
Gunny Smith, is that you?
Any hillbilly with a cutting torch can do it for less, and more efficiently.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I'm disappointed by the lack of suggestions of thermite.
- cheap
- easy
- effective
What else?
What, no nuclear fusion reactors? I thought kids were supposed to be innovative these days....
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
We have a part that's turning at a high RPM. Why not put a chisel against it and make it smaller? You would need some patience and a sharp chisel.
What about sticking the hard drive inside a slightly more powerful pulse discharge can crusher?
I am guessing it would take a lot more capacitance but it would be fun to see.
I take the disk apart to get to the actual disk. Then I smash it up, it is very brittle. Then I put it in a food blender, and it turns almost to powder. Then I throw the dust in the bin. I don't think anybody can recover its data that way. It only takes 30 minutes. Remember to smash the board and chips up also ... because that is fun too.
I haven't seen anyone mention the classic bandsaw approach yet. You have to be careful not to try to saw right through the bearings, or you'll destroy the blade (DAMHIKT) but the result is a cool set of bookends.
(Use a bandsaw designed for cutting metal, not wood.)
It's just frickin wasteful. I think articles like this are subsidised by drive manufacturers.
Hard disks are so large now, that the standard drive that's fitted to most systems is usually large enough to store all business data that system will ever need to. The only applications that produce enough data to saturate modern drives are video and transaction databases.
The only real reason for physical destruction is to preserve the revenue streams of hard drive manufacturers.
We're now being encouraged to physically destroy flash media at work by incineration or trauma. The flash media only ever contains encrypted data, so it's sufficient to only destroy the key blocks, then the data should be indistinguishable from random noise, and the drive reusable after a reformat. These "special" encrypted flash drives cost £64 for 2GB, when a standard drive of that capacity costs less than £5. McAffee must be laughing all the way to the bank.