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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?
Run bit torrent on a hard drive continuously until it dies. Works every time.
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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.
And when you win a Darwin award, here I'll be able to say, "I knew him when..."
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
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.
Now who the hell is going to trust a post from an NPC. Damn DM is trying to fool us again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Homemade spot-welder is cool, but I think the truly epic way of destroying a hard drive must involve the Flaming Bacon Lance of Death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9dskxN10N0
This sig is false.
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
I'm surprised they only had a list of ten. There must be 50 ways to wipe your platters.
Just give it a whack, Jack.
Smash it with a van, Stan.
Shoot it to destroy, Roy.
Just listen to me.
Soak it till it rusts, Gus.
You don't need to discuss much.
Toss it in the sea, Lee
And get yourself free.
Don't disrespect the denim sheep.
After shooting a hard drive with a shotgun once, I'm pretty sure you going to want to keep shooting it.
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.
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Obligatory XKCD:
50 Ways
Absolutely true.... there is an easy way to avoid that problem in two simple steps. Either one will work:
1. Don't do anything that will raise the ire of someone with access to an appropriate microsocope.
2. If you can't do one, then stop using hard drives from the 1980s. Dude, where do you even find disk controllers for them that work in modern machines?
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Don't do this with a ceramic drive...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
.. 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.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Well, the last thing I remember is, me and Billy Joe and Frankie and my brother George were in the Dew Drop Inn having a few beers, and Billy Joe says 'hey everyone, let's go huntin'!', and I said "I'm game."
Thank you very much, I'll be here all week...
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.
wh11111sh.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
where a raven swoops down out of the sky and snags the coin midair and flies away with it.
I hate it when that happens. Scurrilous wee flappy raven bastards.
Squirrel!
Okay, people, I give up. Can someone please explain why the guy I responded to was funny and what the joke is?
I thought that overwriting everything with zeroes or ones and zeroes was a standard way to "sanitize" a drive, and that these forensic specialists often find data recovery a trivial matter even after doing such a wipe.
I've reread the guy's post several times and am still not seeing what caused the funny bit to be set. (Blame insufficient sleep for this perhaps?)
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