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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.
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.
"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!
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.
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
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
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?
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
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
The platters warp as well, meaning that no head will travel over it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Have gnu, will travel.
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)
Oh so the expensive machine is not intended to prevent forensics from reading the contents of the disk then?
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11985484/IMAG0176.jpg
really really boring....
Taking the thing apart is much more entertaining...
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
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...
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!
That substantial of a chunk of metal would make quick work of the magnetron in a microwave. There's a reason you don't put silverware in a microwave.
You'd have to take them out of the hard drive at least, since the hard drive's enclosure is basically a faraday cage around them.
May as well whack them with a hammer a few times at that point.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
why not just use a standard press brake to chop em in half?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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!
Possible, it certainly is a lame device and an even lamer (?) article.
The device is flawed, because as brutal as it is, it does very little to protect the data from being read again. You may need a laser to do it, but apart from whole it is still all there.
And the article is just terribly pointless. Pressure is not measured in tons. Pressure actually has no role in erasing hard disks - 30 kN is no better the 1 kN, or even 1 N. You can drill a hole with less, if you like...
Overwriting your hard disk once is still one of the best strategies, even if it is boring. If you need to be really sure that the data is gone, you have the choice of heat, a strong magnetic field, or pulverisation. Note how punching wholes is not an option.
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.
The device is flawed, because as brutal as it is, it does very little to protect the data from being read again.
Yup. It's quicker but potentially less effective than a single pass of "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk-to-be-wiped". Writing zeros across the disk will wipe any disk made in the last 15 years or so, beyond all hope of recovery.
No, you don't know a company that can recover it. No, the NSA don't have a big magic machine that can recover it.
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.
When the disk is non functional, degaussing works great on hard drives. Though you should not degauss a hard drive that works as it whipes the hard disk parameters from it and makes it completely unusable.
http://www.datalinksales.com/degaussers/home.htm
(quick Google, I have no tie to this company.)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yup. It's quicker but potentially less effective than a single pass of "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk-to-be-wiped". Writing zeros across the disk will wipe any disk made in the last 15 years or so, beyond all hope of recovery.
No, you don't know a company that can recover it. No, the NSA don't have a big magic machine that can recover it.
How does one do this on Windows? I don't run Linux, but I know enough to know that /dev/zero is one of Linux's special directories that does stuff. (/dev/null is another one, besides /dev/random) and thus just telling the disk to put itself in /dev/zero (or whatever that code means, I'm more of a level designer myself and can't read code unless everything is fairly plain) isn't going to work.
I plan on doing this after recovering any data from a failing drive of my own. And then drilling a hole in it. And then having it be sent off to be recycled (ie melted down and made into something else)
Any comments made by the owner of this signature should be disregarded as irrelevant, uninformed, and idiotic.
Basically, anything that would write sectors full of zeros (or anything else, for that matter) to the drive, ignoring the file system.
Recovering data from drives that are working correctly - ie., when you boot your PC, or fire up a browser, or anything else that loads data from the disk - is nothing short of miraculous these days. It doesn't take a lot to make it totally unreadable.