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A Glimpse Inside Google's South Carolina Data Center
miller60 writes "Google today released a video showcasing the security and data protection practices in its data centers. Filmed at the company's South Carolina data center, it provides a look at Google's wiping of data and (literal) shredding of hard drives."
Amazon also released photos of their East Coast datacenter today.
They're only being discarded because they've started to fail. So giving them away would be a bit of a dick move, regardless of whether it's a privacy threat or not.
As for the shredding, my bet would be that they're just following a data-destruction spec from 10-20 years ago, when wiping really wasn't a surefire way to destroy data.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Did anyone else notice in the video at 00:53 that the guy is assembling the server... With an IDE hard drive?
Yeah, sure. Google will just invent a hard-drive disassembling, sorting, and recycling robot. Are you fucking nuts? What's next, Google will just invent some self-driving robot car?!
A very, very common failure mode for a hard drive is that it continues working until either the electronics or the mechanics of the drive fails. At this point, it's too late to zero it out.
Now that it has failed, how does one erase it? Well, one can either try to put the platters in a new enclosure with fresh mechanics and fresh electronics...
or one can destroy it.
Guess which one is cheaper. :-)