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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.
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
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
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
The margins between the heads and platter are extremely small. The platters will warp making the disk unusable.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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
No they almost certainly mean force. Shop presses are sold by force. 1000 psi hydraulic tubing, fittings, pump, and o-rings vs some diameter (area is what actually matters) ram equals X tons. The shop press manufacturer has no idea what shape die you'll install. If its a wedge, I guess the area is theoretically zero at the point and the pressure is infinite. More likely limited by the compression strength of the metal in the die.
Here's a Harbor Freight Chinese 20 ton press, less than $300 delivered.
http://www.harborfreight.com/20-ton-shop-press-32879.html
Chinese presses used to be famous for shipping with cast iron plates instead of steel plates. People die or are horribly wounded when the cast iron inevitably shatters. So be careful and/or buy or make your own steel plates. Another thing to look out for is Chinese "1000 psi" fittings and hoses might not actually survive 1000 psi when brand new, much less after years of abuse. So buying a press 10 times bigger than you think you need is not all that bad of an idea, assuming you can afford it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
really really boring....
Taking the thing apart is much more entertaining...
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.