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The 'Three Ton' Hard Drive Destroyer
Barence writes "Last year, PC Pro welcomed a DIY-style hard-disk destroyer into its Labs to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting platters. Now the technology has moved on, with the Ideal 0101 — a device that pierces disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force. 'It's not the quick cut-and-shut process you'd assume it is,' says PC Pro's reviewer. 'Instead, the 0101 seems to enjoy its particular method of torture.The punch emerges from the side of the bay, slowing piercing its way through metal, silicon and glass, before retreating once the disk is destroyed.'" I attached a video clip.
did they commission this for all those samsung drives they are about to purchase?
anyone else manually dismantle the things and remove the magnets because they're decently strong?
A drill press works faster and is a lot cheaper. granted it does not have bright green lights and a lot of over-engineering, but hey.
Can they make it do some laser effects and add a smoke machine so it looks really cool?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
After you recover the magnets of course.
usually i just take my hard drives to the cove and put some .223 through them.
"disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force"
"That’s enough power, according to Duplo, to theoretically lift a truck, so you can be sure it’ll put a rather large dent in the average hard disk."
Now I'm rather confused. I'm pretty sure they mean pressure not force, since I honestly doubt that a 2.5 'ton' of force is needed to punch through a hard disk.
Now when the 'truck lifting' part got mentioned it only made things worse.
Thermite is cheap. Granted, a device capable of actually holding a melting hard drive might be more expensive, but I have to imagine that taking a trip to an appropriate location several times a year would be relatively cheap. It'd certainly be a lot more fun.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My dataserver is at the edge of a Japanese volcano. I prefer to just have it thrown out the garbage chute. The one connected to all the yellow trashcans there. Or fly it by #4 reactor.
This hardly destroys the device. A simple puncture?
We have been able to reconstruct 60% of harddisk data when a bullet was shot through it. This example follows a very similar pattern.
Fun? Maybe. But a "Hard Drive Destroyer"? I'd rather play with thermite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
This seems like a very expensive way to not destroy a hard drive.
Forensics buffs could probably restore a lot of the data on a hard drive that's just had a hole put it in.
Beating it senseless with a hammer & chisel will have a similar efficiency, but will be a lot cheaper.
That's so sinister yet so cute, makes me uncompletely uncalled for think of the big lables and their lawyers.
Why business intelligence matters in 2011
Because apparently, business intelligence did not matter prior to 2011.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
OK folks.. this is how the government gets it done.
An industrial metal shredder. Nothing left bigger then a dime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd_O7-rqcHc
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
You could also put the platters in your $50 microwave oven for 15 seconds and get better erasure.
That's no way to talk about my mother!
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hd[x]
not to destroy them, but to send them out into space, in a random trajectory, like voyager 1. 300 centuries hence, our distant children, or aliens, can find them, decipher them, and find all about the wonders of cookies, porn spam, twitpics, and excel 2003, among other digital detritus of our lives
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This method lacks some seriously more convoluted math. I mean, practically pure mechanics are fine, but... Well
A serious EMP "can-crusher", with caustic plasma torch "spikes" filling the (ceramic) chamber with molten magma in an instant. Now that would be technically and scientifically waaaaay more cool!
And the half-melted paperweight would look decisevly wicked. Sort of like hans Solo in carbonite (that the name?). Except for a mouse, or something.
If the containment were thick enough, a brisk liquid-nitrogen "pre-cooling" phase, would make things even mor spectatcular. Not t mention interesting.
Oh well. Back to the usual dull chores.
I use my trusty oxy-acetylene torch, it takes but a second to pierce the top cover. Once the top cover is breached the disks are vaporized almost immediately with no possible chance of recovery.
Got Code?
I'd have thought that would leave plenty of room for recovery of at least some data.
Software shredding should be sufficient (multiple iterations of writing random data to the drive then wiping it again), and leaves the drive usable in the end.
If it makes it through the disk? I would much prefer a device that made several holes with whatever force was necessary versus one that makes one hole with as much force as possible.
Really, you have? On a modern drive?
Because modern drives have glass platters and the gunshot shatters them into millions of pieces.
A drive from the 80's and early 90's? yes.
A drive from the past few years? no.
I dismantle every drive that we are getting rid of, usually about five a year.
So far, the only glass platters have been in laptop drives. The most recent 3.5" drive was from 2010, and had aluminum platters. The laptop drives seem to have had glass platters all the way back to the early 1990s.
Putting moderation advice in your
If it makes it through the disk? I would much prefer a device that made several holes with whatever force was necessary versus one that makes one hole with as much force as possible.
I didn't read the article, only saw the video, but the video shows the machine punching only one hole through the disk? That leaves all the other data intact. Or does the machine keep repeating this step for the whole area of the disk and did the video show only one of the punches?
Anyway, why does the force even matter? If it punches only one hole. Whether that hole was made with one gram or one teraton of force, it's still just one hole...
Heh, I can see all the subpoenas and arrest warrants coming back at us from place more prudish than Saudi Arabia
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Only the data on the platter where it is pierced will be destroyed. I think that about 90% of bits is still readable on the platter, with proper equipment. I wouldn't trust my countries deepest secrets to this device.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I expected to see the entire HDD crushed. Or maybe an array of spikes to thoroughly perforate the disk.
A single spike? A single hole in the disk?
I'd assume the controller and electronics are toast... But I bet that if you were sufficiently motivated you could mount those platters in a new box and recover a good chunk of data.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter.
This does not seem to be true across all manufacturers. I dismantle all of our drives before disposal, and I've only come across glass platters in laptop drives (they seem to have been glass all the way back to the early 1990s, the earliest one I disassembled was from 1992 and had glass platters). All of the 3.5" drives have had aluminum platters, from the cheap 5400 RPM drives to 10000 RPM drives from servers.
It's possible that some manufacturers use glass platters in certain model lines of drives, but there doesn't seem to be an industry-wide changeover to glass platters. I have a stack of aluminum platters here to prove it - the most recent from a drive manufactured in mid-2010.
Putting moderation advice in your
There aren't any three ton hard drives any more, so I can't see the point in building something to destroy them.
excel 2003? i can only imagine the following response onboard the alien mothership:
"Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"
People, what a bunch of bastards
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't anthropomorphize the machines. It makes you look silly, and they hate it when you do that.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hd[x]
When a sector is about to go bad (not be reliable for writing), it's remapped to somewhere else on the disk. The original data is not wiped, and can be recovered with forensic readers.
Some SATA devices support an ATA Secure Wipe command that is designed to erase the whole drive, including re-allocated sectors. But Seagate refuses to tell people which drives successfully implement ATA Secure Wipe. I've tried, they flatly refused, even as a member of their 'Business Partner' program.
So, hard drives need to be physically destroyed instead of recycled or passed on to non-profits who could use them. Ubiquitous ATA Secure Wipe (and RAID-1) would do wonders for the environment and charity. I can only conclude that Seagate hates the planet. ;)
Perhaps when China's restriction of rare earth elements hits them in the pocketbook they'll see the wisdom of recycling.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11985484/IMAG0176.jpg
really really boring....
Taking the thing apart is much more entertaining...
Why send them into space? Why not just bury them somewhere? "Sending stuff into space" is very costly and is the optimal solution to very few problems.
Drill through the aluminum casting instead of the stainless plate. Less work, less bit wear.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
the internet
1. where someone can be guaranteed to post a mindlessly negative and/ or cynical response to your comment
2. someone else can read into what you say with the most radical assumptions you never even remotely alluded to, and respond with an angry tirade as if you had said something totally different
3. someone else can take the most throwaway ridiculous joke... and consider it with the utmost seriousness
http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+serious+business
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seriously, has nobody considered Daren's Boot and Nuke? It's the same level as specified by military intelligence. And what about putting the hard drive on a Gauss pad for 30 minutes. I seem to remember those thoroughly "fixing" dirty data on a drive.
I use a drill press, works wonderfully...if it's a metal platter, it gets a 1/2" hole through it...or two...or three...depending on the level of assured destruction the HDD needs to keep the data secure. The metal bits left over inside the casing are icing on the cake - a few dozen shakes with that and you're pretty much guaranteed that the data will be unrecoverable...or so much more of a pain in the rear to handle, that it'd just not be feasible at any cost. If it's glass, it shatters from the pressure of the drill bit, problem solved.
Can't we just blend it? Surely we all know everything can blend!
Is public geek masturbation (which is essentially what this story is) indecent or just a waste if our time?
Discuss ...
Not even a shot of the drive after the crush. It gets withdrawn out the back of the crusher, no idea if it actually did anything butcrack the PCB. Lame.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Forget the chisel, get an Estwing rock pick. These suckers can rain destruction upon almost any man made or natural object. Depending on how violent you are feeling, you can punch a dozen holes in something in seconds. Then flip it over and smash it flat.
Mine has been hammering rock, concrete, and metal for over 30 years and works as well as the day I got it. My great-grandkids will be beating the crap out of stuff with it long after I'm dead.
http://www.amazon.com/Estwing-E3-22P-22-Ounce-Rock-Pick/dp/B0002OVCMO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1303226325&sr=8-2
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
That didn't destroy much. Someone with the correct skills and hardware could easily read that disk. Throw the damned thing in a smelter...
I use a Ruger Super Redhawk .454 Casull to destroy drives. Sometimes we have a range day and boxes of drives to get rid of and it's BYOG (Bring Your Own Gun). We've had muzzle loaders, full auto Uzi's, Barret .50's, you name it. .22 race guns don't do a very good job though, so they are banned from drive destroying day.
Won't piercing a hole in a hard drive just render data around the area of the hole difficult to read?
I imagine that data in other areas of the platter will be unaffected, and subject to recovery by anyone with the appropriate tools/equipment to to do....
Personally, i've always destroyed old hard drives using thermite which ensures that the platters are totally melted down to form an alloy with the drive casing and the molten iron create by the thermite reaction.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
why not just use a standard press brake to chop em in half?
I don't know if it's okay to do this or not, but I just wrote an article about how to make sure all of your data has been totally erased. Within a few hours of posting it and linking to it on Twitter I saw this article come up on Slashdot's Twitter feed. So I'm going to link to my article here. Thanks.
Dennis Edmondson
Computing Concepts LLC
http://www.computingconceptsllc.com/4-ways-data-gone
Takes about as long, costs tons less.
And I can put MULTIPLE holes if I'm really paranoid!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Physical force is certainly entertaining, but it's a waste of effort. If you want to destroy any magnetic recording medium, all you have to do is heat it past its Curie point. In the case of hard drives, a decently hot fire will do nicely. A bunch of waste paper and cardboard in a steel drum will burn more than hot enough. If you're still bent on brute force, disassemble the drive and use sandpaper on the platter surfaces. Dropping them into hydrochloric acid will also do the trick -- the hardware store grade they call muriatic acid is good enough -- though you'll have more to clean up that way. Punching a few holes in the case and dropping it into a bucket of bleach will probably work as well, as will any strong oxidizer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and the NSA are amused at the amount of paranoia they've been able to generate in this area.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That is the most boring story every submitted to Slashdot. Slow news day I guess.
Looks like some one could sell a safety glasses, sledge and punch kit for half the cost of that machine and a person with reasonable dexterity and strength could do just as good a job, if not better. Heck, you could probably even throw in some kind of jig to hold the parts in proper alignment and keep from accidentally destroying a hand in the process.
nuff said
Nothing beats taking a box of hard drives out to the range and popping them at 100 yards.
So they spent god knows how much money on a machine to punch a hole in a hard drive? What a waste.
They could have blanked the drive or overwrote it with another app or something and then use that drive instead of just wasting it. Only in america would we say "Yeah lets make something to destroy perfectly good products for amusement! Yeah other countries dont have enough food or clean water but were america, we destroy valuable stuff when we get bored and throw away half our food when were full, we worship celebrities because they have more money than us and were all hyporites".
I have to agree with you on this one, the only good thing to come out of a crashed HDD are the magnets. I use them as key holders on the fridge/windows/under the car.
Thanks. I just hand them to the shop guy and he does it. But I'll pass it along.
Back in the 80s I ran a Vax with the 14" RM05 removable disks. My successor at the job got to decommission the disks, which she did by taking them to the machine shop in the building's basement and having them sandblasted. Most sysadmins in those days had one or two RM05 platters on their wall scratched up by a head crash; hers was down to the bare metal.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
it would have a sign that said "automatic backup machine - insert drive here"
I already had a hydraulic device that can be used for disks; it's called a log splitter and it is 22 tons.
Lack of adequate platter deformation is not a problem with my machine.
: )
Thermite
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ckechIqW0
Slashdot is full of pedophiles or what?
Why do you need to destroy your HD?
I take 'em apart and use the platters to make RAIDs - Reflective Array of Incapacitated Disks. Great rear-view mirrors for the cube.
RAID-3 is three platters in a triangle, RAID-7 is one in the center and 6 around it. I have a RAID-13 each side of my monitors....
I laugh when I hear about the "DOD" wipe protocol, because what we actually do here is feed drives to the Ameri-Shred. It's fun.
http://www.ameri-shred.com/Hard_Drive_Shredder.html
Most drives we destroy come from decommissioned copy machines. I never knew that copy machines had disk drives before this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
That is the question.
While it isn't a solution for all of the reasons people destroy hard drives at their end of life, full disk encryption solves all the ones I care about. It is easy to do in Windows or Linux. When you are done with the drive just throw it away. Even handles the "too broken to wipe" case.
The adversaries it doesn't handle are the ones who will just torture the information out of you anyway.
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda
Couldn't you just put the thing in your oven for 1 hr at 350F. Wouldn't that take care of it?
probably accuse us of trying to spread some deadly digital virus around the universe...
"Captain we have found the source of the material"
"Prep the Destructo Ray, and make me some tea!"
Last place I worked simply did a 0 wipe.
If a drive was too dead to wipe, we just used an electromagnet over it.
Dunno what it's real purpose was, but basically, plug it in, hit the button, get a powerful, undulating, pulsating, magnetic field.
Pass it over the drive a few times and toss it into the box.
Currently, we just toss the drives into boxes marked "...eventually".
Hell, our document shredding vendor destroys all my dead drives. I take them out to the truck, set them in one of the bins, and stick around until it is dumped. They even have a camera in the conveyor so I can watch as the drives meet their demise. Quite fun and therapeutic to see them hit the grinder!! Small pieces too, not just a hole in the platter!
Why not go low-tech and completely, absolutely 100% effective. In order to destroy the data effectively every time, you should melt the drive. What could be cheaper than thermite?
Fe2O3 + 2Al 2Fe + Al2O3
All you need to ignite it is a sparkler from the fireworks store (I don't think there are any states where sparklers are illegal, just load up at the 4th of July). Make a stoichiometric (if you don't understand stoichiometry and how to make the proper mixture for this then you dropped out of high school, or did not pay attention) mixture of powdered iron III oxide and powdered Aluminum. Remove all circuit boards (they contain toxic stuff that you don't want to burn), and everything else except for the platters and one side of the steel casing. Fill the steel casing with the thermite mixture. Cover the platters with thermite mixture as well. Cut the little metal stick off the end of the sparkler that is used as the handle. Jam one end of the sparker into the thermite. Light the other end. Move way way back. When its over, you have a pool of metal in the casing, or it melted the casing too. Either way, your data is gone.
This is extremely cheap:
iron iii oxide is ~$500 per metric ton
aluminum powder is ~$4000 per metric ton
sparklers ~$1 for 6
Why would you want to use a more expensive, less effective method than thermite?
We used to keep drives for the first days of Spring and take them outside and hit them with a sledge. But that's too likely to result in injury, particularly with the glass in drives these days.
So now, we keep them in a shipping box until the first days of Spring. Then we take them out and shoot them. A .45 will totally destroy the platter if shot from the top; a .30 caliber rifle round will mostly punch through but effectively destroy the platter. Best of all is a shotgun slug, which has the tenacity to punch all the way through, every time. 00 buckshot from a 3" magnum shell is pretty fun, too. (Wear eye protection and stand at a distance!)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
With a hammer. $6 and I got vent some job frustration at the same time.
I can buy a lot of hammers for 2000 euro.
Or one hammer, and some other cool tech toys.
Reeses
1) Hit the hard drive with a hammer to open up the seams a bit.
2) Place hard drive into a bucket of sea water.
3) Watch the bits oxidize away over a few days.
As a boat owner, I am a first hand witness to how corrosive the sea is to ferrous metals. The thin layer of information on a platter doesn't stand a chance.
You want to shred entire HDDs? Go ask the engineers over at SSI to build you one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
Life is not for the lazy.
30-06 does this quicker, cheaper, and is a lot more fun.
When what I post turns out to be stupid I also pretend it was on purpose. That way I look great no matter what I say!