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Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives?
First time accepted submitter THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "I have 10-15 old hard drives I want to trash, some IDE and some SATA. Even if I still had IDE hardware, I don't want to wait several weeks to run DBAN on all of them. I could use a degausser, but they are prohibitively expensive. I could send them to a data destruction firm, but can they be trusted? What's the fastest, cheapest DIY solution?"
high temperature destroys the magnetic field.
How about thermite?
Shotgun or rifle its fun and educational
Find the correct torx bits and take the drives apart and do your worst on the platters.
Drill Baby Drill
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Next question.
* Drill a hole, pour in acid.
** Pro: Fast, cheap
** Con: Requires you to have access to an acid
* Drill a hole, pour in resin. :p
** Pro: Fast
** Con: Not so cheap due to the cost of the resin.. Unless you swipe it at work
* Explosives
** Pro: Fast, extremely effective and damn fun!
** Con: Most of the time illegal.... *cough*
Exothermic oxidation-reduction makes drives dead.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Microwave Oven
Makes it very hard to get it to spin, so nobody can get the speeds high enough to ge
Subject says it all.
Works great. 3-4 holes drilled through the drive will make it impractical to recover.
Make sure you clean up the shavings. A shop vac is fine.
Remember: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Everything that can produce enough heat to melt the drive
nail gun
hammer, bigger may be better
screwdriver, there are cool, powerful magnets inside and the aluminum chassis is recyclable for cash
steel wool on the platter once taken apart (not really important by that time)
Firearms, play safe
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
this was covered a long time ago, if its not in the archives then shame on slashdot
I did it today to one. Unscrew them, take the plates, throw them in different recycling bins/garbage cans/whatever. If you're concerned about someone snooping in your garbage, drop one off at a different gas station every morning. Plus you get some neat looking polished Al/Ni discs out of it if you don't feel like throwing them away...12 year old drive's guts were shinier than a bathroom mirror today
I always take them apart and scratch the plates, ala CD destruction. Mostly it is fun to hard drives apart and marvel at their insides, smashing/scratching them is icing on the cake.
If you're looking for fast production-line destruction, take a three pound hammer and punch. A punch driven through the aluminum plate covering the platter section, midway between the center spindle and the edge of the drive, down to the bottom of the case through the platters, will effectively destroy the disks. It will cheaply render the data unreadable to anyone who doesn't want to invest ten thousand dollars investigating the remains of the disks. You can crank through many disks per hour. A 3/8" bit in an electric drill would be similarly effective, and less labor intensive than a hammer, but slower.
Leaving the aluminum plate covering on the drive has the added advantage of containing the shards if the disk platters are made of glass. Even so, I'd wear leather gloves and use eye protection if I were physically destroying them this way.
But with 15 drives, it's just not that big of a job. Why make a big mess? Disassemble them. It takes about 10 minutes per drive, and it's both educational and fun. You can probably do it watching TV on the couch.
A miniature Torx driver set (T6-T9, available from Sears), a flat bladed screwdriver, a #2 Philips screwdriver, and a pocket knife is all I need to take most drives apart down to their components. Recover the voice coil driver magnets, they're always useful. Remove the circuit boards and recycle them as they were probably soldered with lead. Remove the platters from the spindles. To truly be rid of the data, you'll have to basically destroy the platters in a very hot fire. Heating them past their Curie point will completely destroy the data, leaving them totally unrecoverable; but that may require heat as high as 1500 degrees F. You won't get that on a stovetop.
John
Drive slagging. http://eecue.com/c/driveslag
Sledgehammer and safety glasses...
Microwave oven, if you don't mind buying another one
1/4" bit, drill 3 or 4 holes through the drive around the platter. Cost: zero. Time: about 1 minute per drive.
...It's the only way to be sure.
When I worked as a Data Security Tech we formatted them with 1's and 0's 7 times before crushing them with a drill press. NO ONE could recover that data.
take a drill, and have some fun, shatter the disks!
Just fun.
If you place them in a magnetic field and bang them with a hammer it should jolt the molecules into alignment with the magnetic field. I'm not sure how well however.
Just ask Blendtec, Will it Blend? LOL http://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec Love these videos
TekGoblin
Open it up, pull the plates out, and run through each one via a shredder, using the slot for CD-ROM if your shredder has one, otherwise the normal slot for paper is fine. Just make sure you don't put it more than one at a time, and be prepare to endure the noise it generates.
New Economic Perspectives
Power drill a couple of holes straight through the drive should do the trick.
Takes very little time, and unless you are a person of extreme interest to some three letter acronym somewhere, it should be good enough.
...similar to 'Punkin Chunkin'.
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
Just hit the drive a few times and bust up the connector. Not perfect but hard to undo.
750 grains moving at over 3000fps, adding up for over 13,000 ft/lb of muzzle energy, there will be nothing usable left.
why would dban take several weeks? I think you're doing it wrong. DBAN can wipe multiple drives in parallel, and should only need 12 hours at absolute most for full paranoia mode.
Remove the plates, use an inexpensive grinding wheel to remove the thin chemical layer from each plate. Shotgun=recoverable sectors.
...delete all other copies.
They should magically become unreadable.
Best Cheapest way to destroy the HDD are to submerse them in a tub of water and whack them in the freezer...this will destroy the electronics, while physically destroying the platters. Making the surface completely unusable.
1)A hammer party is probably the cheapest easiest way.
2) take out the physical disk platers from the enclosure and microwave them.
3 Shotgun
4hacksaw (in half)
..........FULL STOP.
I use the free version of killdisk for a quick once over, then smash with my sledge hammer... good enough for my data which isn't very sensitive.
Chances are a Charity would be elated to have 15 extra drives and surely would go to the expense of recovering old data... just saying :)
We have several local destruction companies that will do one off deals and small contracts with the public. They even let you walk your drive up to the conveyor to the shredder so you can be certain your drives are destroyed.
I think we ended up paying something cheap like $1.50 per drive when we last used them ( though we were destroying ~ 200 drives )
It is my understanding that there has never been a single proven recovery of a drive that was simply zeroed out. No silly "military grade" wipe software necessary.
one shot from a .30-06 rifle. Punches a nice little hole in the casing, and shatters the platters inside. It's quite fun too!
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Radio-Shack-Realistic-44-232-Bulk-Tape-Eraser-Fedx-Ground-/380373076967?pt=Vintage_Electronics_R2&hash=item5890008be7
And, break the PCB.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I've taken heaps to 3rd party secure destruction places in the past and they allow me to sit with ear muffs and safety glasses and watch them get destroyed and turn into metal garden mulch,just find a place with competitive prices and your good to go
Really -- target practice. Get a simple .22 LR rifle, take the hard drives out the country, lean them against a log, step back, and have some fun. Total destruction.
I think I'd definitely trust physical destruction (take apart, rip platters out, smash with hammer, dispose) over multiple write erases
I seem to remember seeing a hydraulic press/punch being used by someone - - put a nice one inch hole in the hard drive and that was that but it wouldn't take long to take them out and just smash the platters with a sledgehammer...or using the sledgehammer itself on the hd may be fun too
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
What - we just had the "omg how do I save my pictures/videos for my great-great-great-grandchildren!?!?" 3-monthly Slashdot story, so now the "aaaargh! I can't let some schmuck discover all the home made porn and paste it all over the interwebs!!!" was overdue?
Seriously, people... HDD tech hasn't changed enough to make the same answers from 5 years ago any different now.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.org+how+to+dispose+of+hdd
I can't stand "security" people in business in general with this impulsive urge to physically destroy hard drives because of the data they stored.
Go do some googling, a simple ONE PASS of 0's on the disk WILL make the data absoloutely, without question unrecoverable, anyone who tells you otherwise is in to voodoo and black magic or trying to make some profit.
A huge amount of these "security professionals" insist on trashing perfectly good hardware for no apparent reason, it's a complete was of good resources.
The amount of perfectly good disks I've seen killed is astounding and not always old clunkers either, some relatively decent sized, high performing disks to boot.
DBAN doesn't take forever either, hook them up to a spare PC and fire it off, change the disks every couple of hours, infact if I recall DBAN supports multiple drives at the same time.
Sure if you have a 40gb IDE or something, just drill a hole in it - but if you're trashing anything over 160gb you're starting to ruin perfectly good hardware, for the sake of being pedantic and frankly stupid - stop and just don't do it.
This goes for anyone else suggesting the same thing, go and do some reading before believing any of this "must be 12pass write" rubbish to a disk.
FWIW A good 0 write to a disk doesn't normally take more than a few hours.
Very powerful magnets in the drives. Open them up, take out the magnets, and throw away the drives. If you are really paranoid, pop the discs out. But definitely salvage the magnets. They come in handy.
54 Cal round ball from a Hawken black powder rifle at 75 yards... Its how the mountain men of the West got rid of their hard drives.
Just nail through the case and through the platters.
--PM
Take a hammer a give them a whack.
The platters inside will shatter. It doesn't take much ( you don't have to beat them to death or anything) and you be able to easily hear all the glass/ceramic inside.
This doesn't work with all hard drives. Some platters are aluminum, but it's worth a quick test before you go through the trouble of doing anything else. Use to do this in the shop I worked in. Interestingly all the 2.5" drives I have ever run across have all been glass/ceramic.
I always just take the platters out, run a magnet over them and hang them on my wall. I play with the platters fairly often as well so there's not a whole lot of chance for any data recovery. Plus they look cool!
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
One pass with zeroes or random data over the whole drive is sufficient, unless you expect that a large government agency is going to open up the hard drives and spend millions of dollars to attempt to recover the data (and even they might be unable to get at the overwritten data. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html).
With dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb you can wipe all the hard drives in a weekend.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Remove the platters and sandblast the surface film off. Take about 30 seconds per platter with a decent sandblaster.
How likely is it that someone is ever even going to try and get the data off the disks? Obviously it's not national security data or you wouldn't be asking here. Put it another way, how much is your data worth to others? Would someone want to invest $10, $100, $1000, or $1000000 of effort in trying to recover it?
For something different - open the lid of the drive, put some sand in there, close the lid, give it a vigorous shake, then power it up. It should be destroyed in no time.
I simply got a set of torx drivers, and take my drives apart. Then I bend/scratch the disks and the control board; running the reader arm magnets over the disks is if I feel extra paranoid.
.: Max Romantschuk
I'd go all Office Space on those drives for a starter.
I take them apart and use the spindles for fun and they have awesome incredible magnets in them.. Costs NOTHING!!!!
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
few hours fucking around with hard drives, or five minutes smashing old hard drives that are too small to be worth someone's time reusing (really who needs a 20 gig hard drive)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Drive.Open();
@Platters = Drive.Remove()
Pieces = map {crack in two} map {apply orbital sander} @Platters;
ForEach( Piece, Pieces)
{
If( Today + 1 == garbageDay() )
{
push @garbage, pop @pieces
}
sleep 1 day
}
I leave garbage collection as a separate function...
This is the among the best and cheapest ways to destroy your HDD.
Submerge your drives in a tub of water, whack them in your freezer, done!
Water will destroy the electronics, while the freezing process will physically destroy the platters, rendering the disc completely useless.
After installing Windows on a hard drive, it becomes worthless. And after a while the actual bits will become corrupted into random values.
--
make install -not war
Thermite, or any other method to melt the platters.
rent a roofing nailgun. 4 spikes per disk, unless the NSA is after you its all good. If the NSA /is/ after you, they know you're on /. anyways so why ask??
A very large hammer
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Hydrofluoric acid bath.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/189401454/researchers-find-technique-to-quickly-erase-hard-drives.htm
Also, google.
If you have access to metal working equipment, I'd just use an oxy-acetylene cutting torch. The thin metal case and platters melt away in a second or two... This is by far the most effective method i've discovered, you can do 20 hard drives in 20 mins.
Unless you are worried about the feds recovering your kiddie porn collection, just wipe the files. If you are worried about your kiddie porn collection, then just have a hammer party. Once they are warped and scratch NOBODY will get the crap off their without NSA levels of resources.
Stupid geek paranoia.
This is inexpensive and very effective. You can even do two at once with a 3" nail!
Just opening the drives is fun. The magnets are quite hefty, and can be used as excellent fridge magnets for large amounts of paperwork :)
Once you opened all the drives, and removed all the plates, seriously, it's already really hard to retrieve any data from it, even law enforcement would not be happy to retrieve data from these drives, even worse if they are all shuffled together.
So you can have a little bit more fun, and put individual plates in microwave on top of a water glass for a few seconds each. More than enough to cook off any residual information you might have, and enjoy a little microwave experiment :) Reminder: Don't breathe the fumes, if any :) It's much less impressive than DVD microwaving but it does the trick.
Then, wash the plates, and use them as coasters for your beer. If you want better protection, glue in felt on one side.
I usually open up the cover, power it the drive up so it spins (so a platter is exposed), use a dremel with a grinder attachment to damage the first layer. This will already make it unrecoverable.
After that I take the bunch of platters and bring it to a scrap metal dealer so it can be recycled / smelted.
I mean seriously. Just get an IDE external enclosure and wipe them one by one, it shouldn't take more than a few hours and most of that time you can be off doing something else.
It takes access to the right tools and takes time but those drives come with strong magnets. Not really all that useful but fun...
You actually do not have to sit there turning a crank to power the computer. Simply start the process and then let it run. Less than a half hour of your time in total, and you have irrecoverable data.
use Thermite.
I agree with the ones who said thermite. It will melt the entire hard drive, save for the frame (aluminum, if I remember correctly). Nothing is more secure than this. If it can spin, data can be recovered. So make sure it can't spin unless you duct tape it to a car wheel.
Eat them.
Another option is not trashing them, but instead put them all in a box to store indefinitely.
A fence, or wall. Step about 15 or 20 feet away from the wall, pick up the hard drive, and THROW the hard drive at the fence/wall Hard. Throwing the disk drive down from a 2nd floor balcony also works (make sure there is nobody down there before throwing); repeat two additional times.
The basic notion is this will subject the disk drive to forces that will damage the very sensitive mechnical servo mechanisms, and the heads on the drives.
Next, grab a hammer and a chisel. Wear face protection. Find a portion of the disk drive that is plastic, use the chisel and hammer to cut through the plastic a bit, until the seal is broken.
Get A tub full of brackish muddy water with some salt and some citric acid.
You know... put enough water in a tub to fully immerse the target drives, drop the hard drives into the muddy water. The destruction is almost immediate... but for good measure, soak them a few days.
If you're feeling really diabolical, run an electrical current through the water.
Especially for some of the older models, check ebay first to see what they're selling for. You may be surprised at what some DIY drive rebuilders will pay for an exact match of a drive they're trying to fix. That useless-to-you old 40GB drive may contain the exact drive motor or controller somebody's looking for (and willing to pay for).
He said "IF" he had IDE hardware capable of interfacing with the drive. He doesn't, so the act of physically destroying the drive isn't some massive security precaution, but one of simple convenience.
Better known as 318230.
Did you mean impossible? Or implausible? There's a difference. Underneath all thoses glorious 1s and 0s is a magnetic signature that is very MUCH analog. Is it possible to run the hard-drives, as is, through some software and pull overwritten information off the drive? Hell No. The drive controllers don't report the relative strength of the signal, just the 1s and 0s that it reads based on the strength. Would it be expensive/time-consuming/unreliable? Yes. Not impossible.
Powerful alternating magnetic field. Cheap on eBay.
Let my wife at it.
Not true. A data recovery firm can look at the magnetic rings left on the disk and determine what the data was before the 0's were written to it.
The easiest way is to take them apart (get the goodies inside, like the magnets and the high speed bearings for the spindles) and then take the platters, and blast them with a blowtorch until they get past the curie point of the metal.
A news clip of the data recovery show what can be done with cash, time and skills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R3QgmWstJA
1:18 mins in shows what arrived, gets cleaned and data thought/hoped lost is been recovered.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Funny, we just ran into this very situation at work today. Since we happened to have a band saw capable of cutting metal, someone just simply cut it right in half. Took about 30 seconds and it was rendered useless.
If your data was really that sensitive, you would have encrypted it in the first place. Then there would be no need to wipe the disks. And you could have used Google, but you wanted attention, so you brought this old question back to Ask Slashdot for yet another unnecessary run.
Best way to destroy hard drives:
Put important data on them and don't back up.
I'm sorry, I didn't see him specify 20 gig hard disks, where did he state that?
I Take these apart regularly and the magnets are fun to play with for many people.
But a bit more fun (yet risky) but cheap method of destruction of a stack of drives, is Thermite.
I have done this just for fun factor. The recipe is common; aluminum particulate and rust (iron oxide). ignite with something that has a high heat. A stack of 15 HDs can be melted to nothing in about 15 seconds.
Oh, and thermite isnt illegal, far as i know.
Remembering a troll post i saw once, you could rub a magnet over the side of it/them a couple times. it 'should' wipe everything from them. Now i cant remember if this really works, but id assume it does. I've never trashed old drives personally... i like keeping them as collectibles... from my 8Mb hard drive to my 3 TB one... Good times...
In five minutes you'll be able to smash about two of them. Smashing hard drives isn't easy.
Here is a simple backyard and toddler recipe, but lets think about basic physics and practical terms here. First, magnetic media does not like high temperatures. Let's save that thought for last. Second, making a platter unreadable would discourage all but the most ardent NSA types from reading the data. Third, a simple Radio Shack bulk eraser would eliminate the majority of the recoverable data. Fourth, removing the platter from the case would discourage 99.9999 % of population from trying to look at your data. So using these simple ideas with a toddler at a backyard BBQ, you can secure almost any magnetic media. So here is the simple recipe:
1) Crank the BBQ, crack open a beer, and open up the hard drive.
2) Remove the platter.
3) Plug in the bulk eraser and go to town. Show the kids how cool a bulk eraser is. They make great noises when the magnetic media bounces around the eraser's case while erasing. (Warning, don't let the kids practice/play on the magnetic media you want to keep.)
4) Put the platter on the ground and tell the kids it is a Beyblade. They'll proceed to scratch it up.
5) After they get bored with it, spice up the experience with a hammer. Kids love an opportunity to play the "Luddite with a Hammer". Make sure they smash it really well. When they get bored of a normal hammer, pull out a sledge hammer and you will get 2 to 3 more minutes of bashing fun. If you have a couple little boys, turn it into a competition and they'll want to do even more/faster/ bigger/more "smashier" than before. Play "Ben 10" Humangasaraus (spelling?). Remember, keep it fun.
6) By now, the coals should be nice and hot. Place the bashed and demag-ed platter on the coals, replace the grilling surface, throw on hot dogs (for the kids) and hamburgers for the adults.
7) After downing the food and beer, let the BBQ cool. Once cool enough, remove the bashed, cooked, and demag-ed platter, using gloves so nobody can get a fingerprint or a DNA sample. Place it into a newspaper bag.
8) Take the dog for a walk and deposit the bashed, cooked, and demag-ed platter in someone's trash can.
9) If anyone sees you depositing the plastic newspaper bag, they will think your just the neighborhood turd putting your dog's poop into someone else's garbage can. Unless they have a really strange fetish, they probably won't pull the bag from the trash can.
10) Then, you can rest assured that the the spy sat captured everything on video from orbit.
Fast: Shooting range, rifle.
Jesus GOD mod parent up! Remember when security progressives realized that security is a cost vs. effort equation? That applies to hardware destruction. It's not fucking worth it. How many assholes with a grudge do you think actually have an electron microscope and enough hatred for you to want to use it just to get your company's expense reports? Get off the ego trip, buy a degaussing wand (what the DoD uses, btw) and take off the damned tinfoil hat.
That's the best solution.
Last time I threw out a hard disk, I just did something like:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
I have heard that there are people that can recover data after this, but... why would they bother? Protecting against the low-hanging fruit (someone picks up drive, mounts it) is probably a reasonable approach.
Physical destruction is appropriate for used drives because they're really bad resources. Spinning disk drives are machines that wear out over time. They get a few thousand hours on them, and then they die.
I've measured the actual MTTF of drives that had published specs promising 300,000 hours MTTF. Of a population of 24 drives, I had 30% mortality within 60,000 hours (with somewhere near 25,000 being the mean.) That means we saw quite a bit less than the 300,000 promised hours. And these were the all-the-money high quality 15K RPM server drives, properly mounted in cooled systems, not the cheap consumer grade drives that were roasted in a cheap PC case. Old drives are a time-bomb with a very finite life.
New drives are down to $0.05 per gigabyte or less. They use less electricity than older drives, and have capacities far greater. And the machines aren't worn to within a few hours of the end of their useful life. It's false economy to think that old drives are worth saving. They're certainly not worth risking your data on.
John
use them as speakers. PWM baybeee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQd2n99zS4 but i like floppies better... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE
Put them into a RAID 5 array. Tap one of the hard drives while it's running - this will lead to array failure. When it tries to rebuild, it's almost guaranteed to hose all your data. To increase the chances of data loss, be sure to place the only copies of pictures/videos of important events in your child's life.
Can only be done with a little bit of foresight, but: encrypt all drives. Then you just need to throw away the key. Works even for damaged drives.
wiebetech.com makes drive erazer ultra, which is a hardware device that sanitizes drives. it can even activate the secure erase procedure in newer drives. costs $300. fairly inexpensive compared to $4k degaussing solutions.
I'll clear them off for ya, sheesh, i'll rewrite data over 9000 times if it makes ya happy, but let me have the drives.
I'm poor and destroying useful hardware hurts me.
Be seeing you...
One word: thermite.
The same place he said he wanted to fuck around for 30 hours writing 0's to 15 drives rather than 3 minutes smashing them and tossing them in the recycle bin. Yes I know he doesn't have to watch them the whole time but he would have to physically be swapping them in, out, checking the progress, come back, check the progress, swap, check the progress, wait, check the progress.
I'm sick of people who don't understand the words "opportunity cost".
Simple. Just write on the drive label with red sharpie:
"EMERGENCY RESTORE DISK"
"CRITICAL SYSTEM BACKUP"
"STORE IN A SAFE PLACE"
Done! - Drive is now guaranteed unreadable.
Fire away until destroyed. Gets the job done and it's fun.
Wrap each one in a black plastic bag so it looks like a brick, tape a bunch of wires to them and stack them neatly in a duffel bag.
Head to the security clearance area nearest airport, hold bag above your head and yell 'BOMB' as loud as you can.
With any luck the TSA will detonate them for you!
Others have posted on what to do with your current problem. Now that you see how annoying it can be may I suggest full hard drive encryption from now on. Then when you want to get rid of the drive you just throw it away.
Most PC's have 6 SATA ports, so that's 6 disks at a time. Fine scrap the IDE ones (then again, a large enough one is probably rare and worth something to a PS2 or Xbox 1 collector)
As I made CLEAR IN MY POST, anything over 160gb is retarded.
I'm sick of people who can't read clearly.
If you had to destroy hard drives regularly, the Pure Leverage hard drive crusher looks like a nice way to do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3ZssxkcsQ
But it's a bit expensive for only 10 drives -- $325.
You've never built a spare PC?
Don't need a new drive for the PS2 / Xbox 1 / PS3?
You don't have 20$ for an external caddy to hold the drive?
Ditch drives under 160gb, it's not worth it, as I clearly stated - however things over that are likely fine. Oh and brand new disks die too, that's what backups are for.
The outfit I currently work for disposes of an unbelievable amount of hardware, including hard drives. Due to *government* requirements, every drive gets disposed of via a company that comes to the site with a portable shredder. Every drive is inventoried prior to removal, secured in a lock box, inventoried prior to disposal, and then shredded. The outfit I work for destroys so much shit it makes me ill. It's so wasteful it boggles the mind. I guess when you're in the business of making money from money, you can afford it. Too bad none of the bean counters have a clue as to how much they'd recoup if they sold the stuff they threw away instead of paying a disposal outfit to take it.
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
Buy a couple of PATA -> USB adaptors, hook them up to multiple computers and away you go. It's going to take time though but one pass of 0s will put it beyond conventional data recovery means. Of course, this only works if the disks continue to work...
A while back I remember a challenge being put out to any company specializing in drive forensics to recover ANY data from a drive that had been wiped using a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or what not. Something in the order of a million dollars or some other huge(ish) prize.
I also remember that there ended up being no takers for what would have in theory been a free meal if we're to believe the prevalent hooplah around drive forensics. Given how widely publicized the challenge was it was taken as many in the know as a sign that despite what the science behind the magnetic data on the platters says, once wiped to zeroes it becomes either impractical or impossible to reliably recover the actual data that was once stored there.
Again, this is just conjecture based on partially-informed observation, and incomplete recollection of that event. I didn't track it enough to know if there ended up being takers after all, how they fared, etc. I do remember it being publicized here on /. so you might search the archives for it. It was some time ago - years maybe, months definitely.
sometimes you can't run dban on the drive because of media damage or head damage. I have two boxes(used to be 10 reams of paper in each box, so it's a fair size) full of hard drives that I haven't gotten around to destroying yet.
Be very careful if you are doing the bend, drill or sand method of ruining the platters.. Laptop drives are usually glass.. shards will go all over, including into your hands.
If you only have one drive that is fine, what if you have two hundred drives and they are not already in a computer?
If it's just typical private but not that valuable stuff like banking info, just overwrite with zeros. To be extra sure or to help eliminate stress, sledge-o-matic till dead.
.38" hole through the platters works quite well...
Wood burning stove in the winter or bonfire in the back yard. Chunk of melted metal. Unreadable. Dozens at a time. Works with USB and SSD also :-)
Something fun: go on youtube ... find a video on diy thermite (it's pretty simple)... gather the offending disks into a pile on the ground or in a dug-out fire pit ... sprinkle with goody powder and light... crack a cold one and enjoy the show. . . it's pretty neat to watch
^ This.
Modern ATA drives (post 2001-ish) have secure erase which includes erasing damaged sectors which would otherwise be skipped over.
Number of overwrites needed
This is one of the laziest posts I have seen yet on Slashdot. wtf people use the internet it's faster than waiting for slashdotters to use the internet for you.
they will then inevitably become corrupted after a couple of years, teaching you a lesson for not asking /. how to do backup your data for eternity
I'd say anything above a 22 long should be enough to put a hole in a hard dive, and will probably be more fun than sanding or something. Smashing is fun too though, its up to you. A 20# sledge and a concrete surface would do the trick too.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I was about to post this myself, but DBAN will do the trick. There's practically no way anyone will recover anything but a few random strings of plain text out of that, and that's only if they have the analog tools in a forensics lab. Even the chance of reconstructing a usable credit card account out of that is in the same probability range as guesswork.
But I will say that your estimate of 200GB is pretty low for what's worth re-using unless you're broke. Any drive that's been in use for 3-5 years is well past warranty and isn't really worth putting anything valuable on without a sensible backup and recovery scheme. Any drive 200GB in size (unless it's SSD, etc) is usually at least that old, I had a 200GB drive personally in early 2003. A brand new 1TB drive will only run $55.
(I of course agree that throwing fresh 3TB drives into tubs of driveway cleaner simply to "100% wipe data" would be absolutely stupid.)
Had a wonderful experience 10 years on best way to get 300 drives /really/ cleaned, and quickly.
With the amount of military people around, the were totally going for the 'thermite' solution, which would have been so incredible to do.
Alas, environmental issues took a part when I couldn't confirm there wasn't anything hazardous, and it'd have taken too long to get someone flown in to get it all certified as safe.
So we just used some linux CD boot disk and did the (however) many writes over it to clear it. 1's, 0's, random, and a few more passes to be 100% sure.
Shame really, I was really getting into the thermite solution. Would have been an impressive sight.
after you trash your disk, mix it in 2 or 3 trash bags and dump it in different places
I found a guy offering a $40 prize for recovering zeroed data! I don't see what that's supposed to prove. That would barely cover paying him to mail you the drive, let alone switching on any kind of fancy disk reading machine.
I can't stand "security" people in business in general with this impulsive urge to physically destroy hard drives because of the data they stored.
Go do some googling, a simple ONE PASS of 0's on the disk WILL make the data absoloutely, without question unrecoverable, anyone who tells you otherwise is in to voodoo and black magic or trying to make some profit.
A huge amount of these "security professionals" insist on trashing perfectly good hardware for no apparent reason, it's a complete was of good resources.
The amount of perfectly good disks I've seen killed is astounding and not always old clunkers either, some relatively decent sized, high performing disks to boot.
DBAN doesn't take forever either, hook them up to a spare PC and fire it off, change the disks every couple of hours, infact if I recall DBAN supports multiple drives at the same time.
Sure if you have a 40gb IDE or something, just drill a hole in it - but if you're trashing anything over 160gb you're starting to ruin perfectly good hardware, for the sake of being pedantic and frankly stupid - stop and just don't do it.
This goes for anyone else suggesting the same thing, go and do some reading before believing any of this "must be 12pass write" rubbish to a disk.
FWIW A good 0 write to a disk doesn't normally take more than a few hours.
Published research says otherwise...
If you're going to make one pass, at least write random data, not zeros you bozo.
I sat in front of the TV watching sports while I removed all of the torx screws. (You need a set of small torx screwdrivers for this approach) I completely disassembled each drive. The electronics went to the next ewaste collection, the empty cases and covers went in the recycle bin. The platters are flat and highly reflective which makes them excellent bird deterrents in fruit trees. The head positioning motor has the best fridge magnet I've ever encountered.
why not just dismount them andput them in a bucket of coca cola or rip its logical boards and throw parts in different locations and at different times? why not buy an old ps2 and use the ide drives to play games? the easiest thing coming to my mind: Fill them with crap, random files, old movies then rip/smash/bury in the backyard? even if someone finds them, they will only find a drive full of crap
Unless you are from the NSA, CIA, FBI or similar, i don't think someone will take oh so much trouble just to recover your old drives.
Now, if you REALLY HAVE TO, mayve a blow torch can do some neat tricks to your drives.
... get over yourself. Your data is not that important. Nobody cares.
Nothing a AR50 with .50cal incendiary rounds won't fix...
HardOCP TV - .50 Caliber BMG - Shooting Hard Drives
Go down to your local construction rental outfit and rent a big mo-fo STEAMROLLER!
Couple of passes with that should do it.
Then for added security, drop them into the forms just before they pour the concrete for a reactor containment vessel.
Three Squirrels
Are the contents of the hard drive so sensitive and idenifiable that you need extreme measure to destroy them? Use a sledgehammer and picture your mother-in-law ...
for multi-platter disks, open the drive, unscrew the platter fasteners, remove platters, and that's really all that needs to be done.
the data is striped across the platters and simply taking the platters out of alignment means the data is pretty much unrecoverable, as the platters the precisely aligned together down to the nanometer.
Put the drives in a big pile with burnable trash and lighter fluid and let them burn at a high temperature. Only the very rich would be able to get data off them once the platters melt and since your cheap I doubt you have information worth the very expensive effort to recover.
Probably not the best way, but......
I was in same situation with a stack or old drives and no way would I spend week runing DBAN on them. So life had been frustrating so I needed to vent a little. I got a small sledgehammer and started whacking away. Surprising the cases were tougher than I thought they'd be, but finally got them open and the platters out. Then bashed the platters till bentup good. I spread the fun out over a couple days but had a good time.
Warning: sometime if you hit a drive a certain way they go flying so be careful.
All you need to do is store your family pictures on them. Hard drives are soooooooo fragile and unreliable. Yet everyone worries about how reliable they are when it's time to throw them out...
Mostly random stuff.
Open it up remove platters, put on gloves and a good dusk mask, though if your that worried about it you really should consider a different taste in porn
Not true. A data recovery firm can look at the magnetic rings left on the disk and determine what the data was before the 0's were written to it.
I have never seen any actual evidence of successfully recovered data using such a method. Not to mention, assuming it is possible, there is no way this process is cheap. Your data just is not anywhere close to that interesting.
http://xkcd.com/538/ (read the mouseover)
[citation needed]
Please provide a link to an article that shows how you can read data off a modern EPRML drive after is has been overwritten. Not something from years past for old MFM drivers, something for modern drives.
Agreed, but I have argued with other professionals until I was blue in the face and they still do silly crap like smashing and soaking hard drives, rather than just BootAndNuke. I think it really is voodoo to some.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
For some reason, my father loves collecting speakers. Giant, useless speakers. Inside large speakers are small but extremely powerful magnets. I ripped one out a few years ago and have been using it for my HDD-eraser ever since. 1) DOD the disk; overwrite with 0's 7 times. 2) Play with magnet on disk. Rub it all over, stick it to all the sides, move magnet around, etc. 3) Drink a beer.
It's the only way to be sure
Disassemble the drive, take out the platters, put them in the fireplace. The platters have an aluminum substrate that will melt and then burn. The remaining magnetic media that was on the surface will crumble in your hands, and has been heated well past the Curie point.
An, the "Nuclear Waste" option. Then sell them on e-Bay 40 years later to some idiot collector!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Use C4. Atomizes the contents. Recover that!
Its really simple just stand up wind with a couple gallons of gas and the solutions in the name. Throw some wood or other trash on there so it will actually burn and don't inhale the smoke from the purple flames and done.
http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted
http://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough-part-2-this-time-with-screenshots
(Key quotes: Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory by Peter Gutmann (35 pass wipe originated from Mr. Gutmann)
âoeAny modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I donâ(TM)t see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.â)
(Article itself) http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
If you're destroying drives on your own, go for it. But in any kind of business, even if you don't have some old motherboard with an IDE connector, it's worth spending the $20 on an adapter or card to just DBAN those crappy old drives.
Why? Solely to prevent someone from injuring themselves while destroying old hard drives with a drill, which is bad in itself. It's worse when they bill the company for the ER visit because a spark gets in their eye. It gets even worse when they go on perfectly collectible workers comp and settle a lawsuit because they weren't given safety goggles when they did so.
Or, more realistically, some manager or person in HR from chewing you out for an hour and writing you up just because they think that way, and you allowed it to happen. And even that will probably not happen, but do always CYA just in case.
Drill + Thermite. Lots of smoke but no more hard drive.
take a cruise, throw them overboard..perhaps by the time someone fishes them out from the bottom your life's data will actually be worth something..and you can write the whole thing off as a buisness expense.
Dissolve the metal off the platters in concentrated sulphuric acid.
Really this is a case of slow news day combined with lack of imagination.
Heck even the unimaginative could type this question into google and see that it has been asked on every other forum on the internet several times. PC Pro even has a Top 10
In summary:
1. Hammer
2. Angle Grinder.
3. Welder
4. Weapon.
5. Magnets
6. Drill
7. Melt them
8. Log splitter
9. Industrial shredder.
10 Thermite.
11. Get the hell of slashdot. This is "news for nerds", not "I'm bored and braindead someone help me".
Drop 'm of a ferry or something. The ocean's a big place, no one will ever find 'm again. Not even if they cared about your crummy data.
old hard drives that are too small to be worth someone's time reusing (really who needs a 20 gig hard drive)
He said some were SATA; I really doubt any SATA drives would be that small. It's just machismo: "My data is so evil and important that the NSA would spend a million dollars to recover it so I have to reduce the disc to constituent atoms".
Bollocks. Just write zeroes over it and you are safe in the real world. CSI and 24 notwithstanding.
is to toss it in to the area where the event horizon is located when an artificial worm hole is created. Make sure to do it a few seconds before establishing said worm hole, the hard drive will be vaporized instantly!
Visit my Forums?
What I find funny is the contradiction. When you want to make data unrecoverable, you have to do some serious abuse. Drilling a hole might not be enough! But when a hard drive begins to fail, somehow that same data is so delicate that any mistake, or no mistake, will lose it all, no recovery possible.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
take roughly 12' of 10 gauge wire, wrap it around the drive... very briefly no more then 2-3 seconds touch each end to a 12V car battery.. create such a strong magnetic field it will perm. wipe any and all data.. I also use the same method to magnetize screwdrivers...
The next time you do some deep-sea fishing, just drop 'em overboard.
Hey, it works for Dexter!
It should keep your super-secret h@x0r stuff safe from prying eyes for a few million years... and then our descendants can find it as a fossil and marvel at your pr0n collection.
Happy to help! You can send the drives that had porn on them to me and I'll erase them for you. Don't worry about drives that didn't have porn on them - since they had no porn you don't need me to erase those for you, so just keep them. If you're really concerned about privacy, you can do a FORMAT C: to wipe them before you send. Don't do anything else though, as it might mess up the secure deletion.
It does a great job of frying hard drives.
I took one to my ex-wife's 5th grade class. Gave them screwdrivers, etc and let them take it apart to them see what was inside. Once they were done with them I'm sure nothing was recoverable.
you know you want to
There was, but that was in the times that the air was clean and sex was dirty. A large capacity drive was 20MB and comprised of 4 platters in a 5.25" enclosure, double the size of a CD-ROM drive.
The original question stated no connecting the drives up to a computer was possible, since the owner didn't own anything that still had the required connectors/controllers to do so. Zeroing out isn't an option within the constraints given.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Windows 7 will surely do..
the one with the large electromagnet slip the person running the crane a $20.00 and instant erasure
beyond that - I'm not to concerned about the residual data that someone "maybe" able to recover from them - if someone really wants my data there are a lot of simpler ways of gathering it than reconstructing a hard drive that has been scrambled by a very large electromagnetic field
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Plus it's very satisfying to do...
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I personally use a microwave. Fries the damn thing into oblivion. Fun too. CDs are also very pretty!
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
you can cleans it with fire!
Thermite or a fire axe will do the trick!
Best way is a supersonic projectile, usually 9mm or larger in handgun calibers, 5.56mm or larger in long gun calibers. While JHP flatten out on the case and usually don't puncture the shell and the platters (they're much better for soft tissue), most FMJ work great as they pierce the case and generally shatter the drives as well. It's also cost effective- as little as $.10/drive for destruction!
I regularly have to get rid of disks of my firm with clients backups etc. I just remove very easily the electronic circuit on the back and then during the cold days of winter I put the disks in my fireplace. I don't know the exact temperature there, but next morning all there is is the outer casing and an aluminum maze in the ash bin. I guess, that does the trick.
Open the hard drive up and pour a little sand into the chamber.
Re-close the container and then run the drive for a few hours, turning every few minutes.
This will remove all of the iron oxide from the platters.
Works every time.
Maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid, but half the people here are saying zeroing out the data is good enough, which I'm not buying... You know what's good enough? Zero out the disks and then destroy them with fire (1500 degree Celsius fire if you will)
The magnet in an MRI scanner is ALWAYS ON. It will wipe the data in the drive, but may do the same for the brain of anyone who happens to be closer the scanner when the drive is ripped from you hands. People who work in MRI take a very dim view of this, and will probably kill you slowly and painfully if you try it.
Take the top covers off and remove the circuit boards then and have a bon fire, chuck them all in once the fire has reached the point where it is burning nicely.
drill a small hole through the platter near the spindle (that's the most active part of the platters) and then drive a desk-screw through it. Effective and obvious.
In five minutes you'll be able to smash about two of them. Smashing hard drives isn't easy.
Huh - seems to take but 3 seconds to heft up the 20 pound splitting maul and bring it down with sufficient force to turn the drive into lots of small bits...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature
The OP doesn't mention what makes the data on the drives valuable. That means that we have to guess about the resources of any potential attackers. Assuming the normal case, simply writing zeros to the entire drive surface as in dd /dev/hd plus storing the drives for a bit of time will probably be sufficient. Writing zeros pretty much means it takes a government agency to recover the data (Think $5,000+ per drive) The additional precaution of storing the drives before release makes it much more attractive to attack another avenue to get the data. If the drives have valuable data on them (financial or medical data for example) divorcing the drive from the drive controller board is probably sufficient. Destroying the drive surface is bordering on overkill yet still satisfying.
Just get me to store my media collection on it. the drive will fail in due course.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Use a sledgehammer
You can cut a drive in half with very little effort.
I have one I no longer use for firewood. A few swings and the drive isn't going to be readable. The platters are bent, scratched and have very wide cuts through them. The PCB isn't whole either.
As long as the disks are still readable by normal means, it is far easier to reliably destroy the data via software than render the drive physically unrecoverable. Wipe the drive, then write random data to it a few times in a row. It is incredibly unlikely for any sector on the disk to contain coherent data after that - perhaps not entirely impossible, but certainly more reliable than smashing the drive with a hammer and hoping for the best.
If you want to destroy the drive out of paranoia (or because it is already damaged and not usable), take it carefully apart, take out the controller board and destroy it (particularly the memory chip), then take the platters, and sand off the surfaces.
Keep in mind that random physical destruction, even methods with apparent spectacular results like shotguns and hammers, will not reliably prevent a forensic laboratory from recovering data. You'll have to carefully and deliberately expose and destroy the parts of the drive that contain the data.
the person responsible for the destruction of the data remains with the batch of HD until they were turned into Emerald dust ( Al2O3)
Highly cost effective!
Take out the platters. Cool them in liquid nitrogen and shatter them with a hammer. That aught to get the pieces nice and small. Watch out for the shards, though! They'll bem mighty sharp.
!
Is a nuclear bomb.
Band saw with a metal blade -- goes through case, platters, circuit boards. A one to two inch cut should be good, but if you want to be sure, slice off a corner.
A nice thing about using a band saw is you can do a bunch of drives in rapid succession.
Not as satisfying as using a 12-gauge or a 9mm, but still satisfying.
2 Bullets per drive ;) Hey if its good enough for the military, its good enough for you!
Plus its fun :)
Might not exactly be the sort of thing you can do in your garage/backyard without attracting the interest of law enforcement... but hey :P
one good clunk oughta do it - anything that dents the platters.
2cents from rainy toronto
Take a few seconds to unscrew it, crack the glass disc. Data is gone. If someone wants that data bad enough to get at it... you're in a bit too much trouble to be on slashdot right now.
Not practical but maybe fun.
At some outdoor, fire safe, location stack all the drives into the highest stable column possible and place some Thermite on top. Ignite the Thermite and watch it eat through all of your drives. Of course, it might not destroy everything as it makes it way down the stack but whatever it touches is never going to be read again.
http://youtu.be/BnHR4cMXiyM
Anybody who can afford the equipment to recover the data can also afford a short length of rubber hose.
Once you wipe the drives with 0s, you become the weakest point.
The truth is that it comes down to COST. It is a bit like encryption, in that it is all about TIME and COST to brute force it. So how important your data might be to somebody is the real factor here. For 99.9% of threats you simply break the circuit board or remove it. 1 bad chip, cap, or resistor would stop these people from using the drive completely. Have you ever tried to get a drive working with a defective circuit board??? I have and it is not easy because most times revisions break compatibility so you'd have to find the exact same board; possibly even the same exact revision. The older the drive the trickier (but cheaper) finding a board gets.
Old drives leave trace data that a zero wipe will not stop and with the right gear it can be recovered. Private corps don't disclose all their tricks, researchers publish most the techniques they think of, the FBI won't get past the techniques you can find out about or they can hire out; while military or other gov have access to more cutting edge techniques. Ever hear of a low level format?? well, that places plenty of gaps on the drive-- you know the drive heads just don't calculate their position on the platter, the platters are encoded with position information. Anyhow, the older the drive the more gap space there is for one to process the noise and extract past recordings-- the newer drives are so advanced they are approaching magnetic "atomic" microscopes (note: I said "approaching,")
An FBI or private firm may have a drive head scanning microscope (using drive tech to cheaply make fast and effective drive scanners) but this will not be cheap to use; also, if you do an IDE zero wipe (if supported) the firmware level wipe will be low level and cover just about the whole surface making it safe. The other gov with more resources and time can probably go a little further... but not all that much for huge cost increases. In theory, a higher resolution reading device can pick up noise 'echos' in the material just as they can recover audio from tape a few times back- somebody dealing in this realm is not you and the cost and expertese must be crazy and on newer drives (possibly everything in the last decade) those techniques may not be feasible at all (but govs worry because unless it is proven somebody might have found a way.)
Poking holes in the platters will stop people willing to drop $1000+ to recover it. For more they can get partial data from segments of it but its not likely going to be all that useful (could be, this is where file fragmentation can cause big troubles.) Holes or shattered platters will make pretty much every reading device really labor intensive and expensive to use.
It is true that gov level wipe algs are pointless because that technique was devised for older drives with different kinds of encoding and also include techniques for floppies -- so doing the 35? pass is actually stupid because it covers a whole range of situations, no device needing them all. Canada for example, their gov lowered it down to 3 pass I think last time I looked.... like 10 years ago I think. a 1 pass is likely enough except for gov. high level gov mandates incineration as a blanket policy.
I say bust a chip; or remove the boards. that is plenty. if paranoid; then damage the platters (or the actuator arm... or a clever person would run a car battery into a few key points to kill the heads or motor in a few seconds.)
FYI: I have an expert level knowledge in this area.
That should do it!
Napalm and Thermite.
Does anybody really just go pick up old drives and attempt to recover old ass data which is more than likely an old installation of windows xp riddled with viruses, porn and toolbars?
If I remember correctly, the classic dd command with bs=512 always takes much longer than a single-pass zero wipe with DBAN. Can someone explain, why? It feels like the HD is seeking all the time when using dd.
Encode the data on the drives in Playsforsure format. That will render it unreadable.
Launch it into the sun.
first, get a hold of a tactical nuclear weapon...
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
1) Run a disk wiping program
a. http://www.dban.org/ - Darik's Boot And Nuke - Choose your wipe method depending on your paranoia level and patience / time available
b. Or use http://eraser.heidi.ie/ for the windows users.
c. or one of the others
2) Now take the hard drive apart. Should be easy enough and you usually end up with some nice heavy duty magnets (depending on the age / generation of the drive).
3) Resist the urge to make drink coasters out of the disk platters.
4) Leave them in a corrosive liquid overnight or longer. Coke? Jik? Acid? no idea what's best. (Some informed slashdotter will help I'm sure)
5) Have a barbeque, fire or braai like we do in South Africa and burn the suckers. The hotter the better I hear.
6) Use a drill / drill press. Be careful of cutting yourself if you go to it with a hammer or heavy duty bending machine. I have heard those pieces can be razor sharp. Use a vice or wear goggles and gloves whenever possible. Also be careful of using chemicals and touching metals / substances not meant exposed. Read the labels. Google it first.
7) No idea if any of the above or below is dangerous but I’m sure some informed slashdotter will clarify.
8) And always remember. Who are you really in the grand scheme of thing, who really gives a %^&$ about your hard drive enough to go through the process of recovery? Maybe it will be easier one day in 20 years’ time and you’re protecting yourself from that, but this is way over the top in some people’s eyes.
9) Another thought is to use encryption like Truecrypt from the start and hence not worry about this sort of thing as much.
If you're a criminal, then you're not allowed to do any of the above, please drop yourself and hard drive(s) into your local police station, confess you will sleep better. I use the above for old company backup drives that contain our pre-encrypted data so no baddies here :)
Just be aware that your data can always be recreated with monkeys with typewriters
i disassembled my old drives and saved the platters and the superstrong magnets. The platters look like steel so I thought maybe I'll just bend them in half and make it not worth anybody's time to try reading them. Platters don't bend - they shatter into a million slivers of something that initially just embed themselves in your hands. For weeks you'll be finding fragments in the carpet 20 feet from the original impact zone.
So wear protection (esp. eyes) and do it somewhere you can cleanup easily. Sound advice for many activities.
Works like a charm for me every time.
Go do some googling, a simple ONE PASS of 0's on the disk WILL make the data absoloutely, without question unrecoverable, anyone who tells you otherwise is in to voodoo and black magic or trying to make some profit.
There are really some voodoo and black magic that can recover data if you erase disk that way. Last time my colleague has to pay ~US$600 on his own accord to recover data on a harddisk he accidentally overwrote with a ghost image. We didn't call for rocket scientists's help, just paid a specialist and the data was back.
Also, you would like to be aware of the fault-tolerant design of modern harddisk that might replicate data in hidden storage, which might be up to 15% of the published space.
So, erase 7 times with patterns, degauss, or even physical destroy is really necessary for erasing sensitive data.
I used to give them to a guy at work, who would take them to the firing range...
The results were quite spectacular, I have one as an ornamental piece in my office.
I think I've seen this particular Ask Slashdot question 5 times before. Editors.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Take them apart and turn them into wind chimes:)
Heat the discs over the Curie temperature
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Curie_temperature
all the information on the disk is stored by magnetic section, the heating above this temperature will make all that information vanish. I theory the disc will be magnetic again when you take it down below the Curie temperature, however, I doubt that a hard drive will work after heated to some hundred degrees. However it is not easy to get these temperatures, a usual oven does not work (for most materials).
More importantly, how can an oyster be well hung?
We wipe to a level that exceeds industry standards as per customer expectations. Incoming media that contains data is strictly quarantined, and catalogued. A harddrive will get scrubbed and then are sold for reuse. Any drives that fail scrub are degaussed, shredded and sold for their scrap material value by the pallet full.
Take your drives along to a local WEEE IT recycle/reuse firm, they wont charge you anything to dispose of drives as they have a value in either reuse or ultimately recycle. They also have strict standards to adhere to and need to maintain a faultless reputation in the industry if they want to continue to get contracts to handle WEEE from their customers. All that goes away if a drive that has passed through them turns up in the wild with data on.
I would scrub them yourself and sell them, be amazed what people will buy.
... It's the only way to be sure...
Zeroing out drives makes them available for re-use, but often the motive for destroying drives is that they have failed and cannot be zeroed.
If the drives cannot be zeroed and you have only a few drives, then disassemble them. Save the magnets. Separate and bend the metal platters with pliers, Use the pliers to break the ceramic ones in a semi-closed container to contain the flying glass shards; wear thick gloves and eye protection to avoid injury from broken glass.
If you have too many drives for zeroing or disassembly to be practical, use a drill press to run several holes through each drive, making sure that the drill goes through all the platters. Wear hearing protection, and have several drill bits on hand, you will wear them out.
submerge the platters in ferric chloride.
you find it in electronic components stores
A really hot BBQ, when the alloy melts then they are done, serve hot, with chips.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
don't smell this
Thermite.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Or, into the e-waste recycling bin at your recycling centre, where they will most likely end up in landfill anyway.
Nobody cares about your data. You are not interesting.
You could easily make your own Thermite or order some from unitednuclear.com. They have quality materials, I have used them in the past for chemistry projects.
Give it to a toddler. Nothing survives toddlers.
Table-ized A.I.
It doesn't work as well as you'd think - believe me, I've tried. What tends to happen is the thermite melts a small hole through the drive, and all drains to the bottom, where it burns a hole in the container and continues further down away from the drive. Even if you use a suitable container (for example, a bucket full of sand), it's difficult to get the whole drive to melt, and there's no way to know if the surviving platters got anywhere near their Curie point. Plus it's a pain in the ass to get the thermite to ignite, and the resulting thick black smoke may very well have your neighbors calling the fire department.
In the end, it's much simpler and less frustrating to simply smash the thing to pieces with a sledge hammer. Thermite for its own sake is fun and (kinda) educational - it's just not a good tool for this job. If you're really paranoid, do a single pass of zeros (or ones, if you prefer) before breaking out the hammer, but it probably isn't necessary. Unless the FBI's hunting you, no one's gonna put in the effort to recover data off a smashed platter.
From a security aspect there is a good reason to physically destroy: it is visible from the outside. The difference between a working drive and one that's been hammered on or sawed in two is quite clear, no need to hook it up to a computer to check whether it's been wiped or not. And when it comes to high-security facilities where it's generally not allowed to take out any storage device, so to take it out you have to make sure it's not a hard disk any more, but a lump of metal scrap.
That said for personal use zero'ing the drive indeed will do the job well enough. And preserves the drive for potential future use.
You may not trust a 3rd party, but they'll give you a certificate of destruction. Your management doesn't care about your DIY method. They care about handing the risk off to a 3rd party they can blame.
Se more than one writer here suggest that one should save the magnets. "They come in handy" - for what? - the refrigerator door?
If you're like me and enjoy taking stuff apart, you can do what I do and just disassemble the drive, bend up the platters, and then throw everything away (and keep the screws, one can never have enough types of screws for various projects.) If it has multiple platters, then actually just taking the platters out makes them unusable as the platters are in a very precise alignment that's set at the factory that is screwed up and impossible to undo when the platters are taken out.
If you can talk brilliantly enough about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
I just give my old hdd's to Icelandic bankers. You wouldn't believe how adept at destroying all kinds of evidence they've become.
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf
A shock wave passing through the material causes enough local heating (and a lowering due to pressure) to pass the curie point (there's papers about that happening in iron powder composites) - but a shock wave that big is most likely going to come from the sort of impact that would shatter the glass platters anyway.
It's glass in those drives. A big drop onto a hard surface is probably all you need instead of ovens and explosives.
Almost right. Older drives had much wider write domains and it was possible to read the data if your zeros write was misaligned.
Newer drives have LBA -- when a sector starts to die it gets remapped without the OS necessarily being involved. This means if you write zeros all over the drive (using LBA addressing) you won't erase the bad sectors. These may still be readable, or only partially corrupt.
So if you are willing to mess with the hard drive BIOS you may get _some_ data from a zeroed drive. You would have to be lucky for that data to have any value in most cases.
Physical destruction is still the gold standard -- or zeroing using software which knows how to get the drive to overwrite bad sectors too.
You should ask yourself: Will it belend?
http://www.willitblend.com/
You don't seem to realise that just because you don't store sensitive information on your hard-drive, doesn't mean that other people don't. Imagine some punk finding an old hard-drive with the XYZ-expensive-product source or credit/debit card info on it in the trash.
Also, he said, "I could use a degausser, but they are prohibitively expensive." (Quick Google search reveals $500 plus international shipping if you don't line in America.)
I had to do this a while back with a stack of old drives. I ended up just smashing the circuit board and breaking off the connector pins.
This of course will only stop a casual attacker. I'm not so concerned about the government recovering the platters and accessing my tax documents, mostly because they already have a copy.
By now I suspect they are buried in a tip somewhere, ready to be dug up in 2000 years by an archaeologist trying to infer information about the period in history where everything was lost in the terrorist EMP attack of 2150.
This seems to be an old, but reoccurring, question to slashdot! The only thing changing is apparently the AGE of the drives. I predict the next who ask will have a bunch of 15-20 year old drives... :-)
just destroy the PCB, no one is going to invest in getting a matching PCB to get your data
unless you have social security numbers and bank info in plain text
do you?
or unless you have something you would go to jail over
do you?
if you really really do I would use a firearm to shoot the heck out of it
I am going to be boring and tell you what I learned from the founder of a data recovery company.
1) One single pass of zeros is enough. urandom if you want to be paranoid.
2) If you want, or need (auditing, etc), to physically destroy the drives: Bend the platters. As soon as the platters are bent, you can not spin them for data extraction, any more. Keeping in mind the distance between head and platters, even the slightest bend becomes irreparable. And as soon as you can't spin them, you are looking at scanning the whole platter without any fancy off-the-shelf controller logic.
According to him, those are the only two cases when they tell the customer over the phone that they don't even have to bother sending the disks in.
I agree that there's likely nothing that can recover a modern (12 years old) hard drive that has been over-written with zeroes. However magnetic imaging may improve in the future and microscopic alignment differences may become detectable in the future.
For that reason I recommend dd-ing /dev/frandom a couple of times (/dev/urandom is too slow and /dev/random isn't worth mentioning for a 2TB drive). If only it was included in mainstream kernels.
If the drive is sufficiently damaged that the wiping can't take place in a reasonable amount of time, then it's Hammer Time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda
is enough.
... it's the only way to be sure.
and get over yourself. Nobody gives a shit about the contents of your old hard drives. Nobody.
Of course now the FBI is interested in you ... as a result of your posting this story on /.. Why do you want to destroy so many drives? What are you hiding and why are you hiding that data by destroying it so completely that no one can retrieve it?
[;)]
yeah sure you can use a gun or some explosives.
but i found the best way possible, and the best thing is you get paid for it. get hired by a company called Netpig as there IT give them the drive and after a day it will be unreadable....dont ask what they do as i am still trying to recover the data from there drives they have ruined (Y)
Sure if you have a 40gb IDE or something, just drill a hole in it - but if you're trashing anything over 160gb you're starting to ruin perfectly good hardware, for the sake of being pedantic and frankly stupid - stop and just don't do it. This goes for anyone else suggesting the same thing, go and do some reading before believing any of this "must be 12pass write" rubbish to a disk. FWIW A good 0 write to a disk doesn't normally take more than a few hours.
yeah... but all that is really necessary is selling the idea to whomever is concerned about any data being reverable that the data is going to be unrecoverable. Period. And then doing a very fast partition deletion, and new partition creation, and either throwing it back in whatever machine it came out of... or even better, never removing it from that machine to begin with, and then installing whatever is running on every other machine in the joint, remove all inventory identifications, reapply a new logged inventory label... and then placing it someplace where it'll get used — might I suggest? - back on the desk where it came from. Put a big sticker on it with a cute name, no one will recognize it. And if one of your peers says anything about it not beng secure, tell them that even if they had the technical resources and the knowledge to recover the data, and even if they went further and did so to prove some ridiculous point about the users super secret data that someone might steal, that if they mention again under any circumstances, you'll burn down their house on principle alone. I just think its a lot faster than the /*gasp*/ sacred "low level" format options, or zeroing drives or ___omg r u kidding?-overwritting random data 37 times or somthing equally preposterous, when nothing rots a perfectly good drive beyond all recognition than Windows and six months of light and causual use by an unattended cube creature —I mean user.
Use full disk encryption.
When you need to destroy the data, erase enough of the drive to destroy the key blocks. Destroy any key backups.
Et voila. You have destroyed the data (it's now just a random-looking byte stream that would take millions of years to decrypt), but left the hardware useful.
Much faster than wiping the whole disk surface.
your computer, your home and three city blocks...
Take a lesson from chemistry.
http://youtu.be/4PKB5nnHGAk
A hammer?
Immigration to Canada
1) Remove all the parts of the drive except for the platters.
2) Put the platters on a flat stone in your yard.
3) Mix aluminum powder with powdered iron oxide in the correct ration to make thermite (both extremely cheap and easy to obtain).
4) Make a pile of thermite on top of the platters.
5) Take a sparkler, cut the end that you hold off so it is all sparkler (no bare metal).
6) Stick the sparkler in the pile of thermite.
7) Light sparkler.
8) ???
9) Profit.
If only you could see how the rest of the world sees you.
Steve Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar once bragged in an editorial that he blew away his unwanted HDDs away with a colt 45.
I've never bought a Circuit Cellar since.
depends on the value of the data: - How much it would hurt you if someone had access to it - How much it would provide to someone accessing it. Personally, I just tear the disks open and break the read/write head On old disks I gained a very powerful magnet once or twice. But most times it's just a fun time with the kids. Show them how the head moves with electricity, etc ...
No matter how many times this thread comes up the answer will always be the same:
Every nerds dream is to invent new ways to wreck stuff: Just do it!
Go in to 'Mythbusters' mode, take a look around the house and see what you've got that might wreck a disk drive.
If you can be bothered to rip the metal plate off the back (yeah you could unscrew it but just grab some pliers and rip!) you'll find some REALLY strong magnets inside. They might be fun too!
PS: No matter what you think, nobody's going to bother trying to forensically recover a hard disk in the trash. If it's even slightly physically damaged, that's good enough.
No sig today...
http://www.maxxeguard.com/
This guy can make 1mm shreds of your disks. Hey, I'm in the high security thing.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
No need even to waste time with DBAN. Just throw an ATA_SECURE_ERASE command to the drive controller, then sit back and relax (assuming the drives were made in the last decade or so the controller will support this). Better then DBAN, in fact, as it will wipe sectors listen in the G-list.
I solve a lot of security and confidentiality issued with a sledgehammer.
For anything else (or to complete the action) I use the fire.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Nope, it could be, but it's not.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Use a drill press with a > 10mm drill and make 3 holes in through the platters. The platters will shatter (i have done this on 50+ old harddrives for my company) and if anyone can reasseble all those little pieces of (mixed) mirrors, then they can also read your mind. It takes less than 1 minute to destroy each harddrive.
seriously if you must know the hardware as well as the 0's and 1's on the platters are destroyed all you need is a simple, low tech, say it with me. HAMMER, doesn't even have to be that big. shatter the platters and its no more data
A simple overwrite will erase the disk irrecoverably ...and this will be good enough for most people for most purposes
But how do you guarantee that the drive has been completely overwritten, most modern OS's do not use the entire drive, do not erase files down to the drive, etc ... if you bypass the OS and do a low level erase that will work but most people do not have the time or knowledge to do this properly ... and old drive is often near to failure and the only way to be sure is make it unusable
In secure environments they destroy drives deliberately so that no drive accidentally gets off site, security guys can see the difference between a physically destroyed drive and a working one, but cannot see the difference between a wiped drive and one full of data ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Do not damage the HDD and leave it unopened. Scatter.
1) Unscrew it head magnets and use them as a clothing dryline like a hipster would.
2) Demolisch hdd platter the most easy way. (likely just unscrewing it and smashing it, or blowtorch and cut it)
3) Break control board in two.
4) Split remains in two batches.
5) Goto 1 untill all drives are dead.
6) Deposit batches seperately.
But, for the truly paranoid, you have to bypass or trick the controller to also overwrite the remapped bad sectors. That's not trivial a task, or, more precisely, it depends heavily on the controller's firmware and drive model.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
A huge amount of these "security professionals" insist on trashing perfectly good hardware for no apparent reason, it's a complete was of good resources.
Pick one:
1. Spend a few minutes physically destroying perfectly good harddisk worth ~50 USD
2. Spend some more of your time and a lot of computer time scrambling the bits, so that you can sell the disk at whatever people are willing to pay for a second hand harddisk
3. Pass on the disk without making the sensitive data inaccessible, and risk huge damages
I know what I'd do. Swallow the ~50 USD loss and sleep soundly at night.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
...the best way to guarantee that a drive will immediately become permanently unreadable and unrecoverable is to put the only copy of some really important data on to it, and let nature do the rest. (What? Doesn't nature hate you too?)
Basically correct -- I'd just like to add that just writing zeroes to disk will not overwrite sectors that have been remapped, and there just might be sensitive information there, even though probability is pretty low. It's also bandwidth limited -- the zero sectors have to be written by the host computer.
Almost all modern ATA drives come with a built-in security erase command, which erases all information on the drive, inlcuidng remapped sectors. And as it is internal command, there is no externa data transfer overhead.
You need a special program that triggers this command though, and it may need some setup to be used (e.g. placed on a bootable media).
DBAN may still be the most convenient approach in that it already is available in bootable forms.
What the hell is on those drives that you're so paranoid about? If you have or work for a company or agency that deals with data that sensitive, you should be fired for not already knowing what to do with it. Otherwise you're being completely paranoid about it.
Take it apart, salvage the awesome magnets and aluminum body for scrap (40 cents/lb or so but it'll add up after awhile) and just toss the platters if you don't want to make wind chimes out of them. If you don't want to make that effort, drive a nail through it and toss. Nobody is going to sift through your trash to get the platters and then spend the tens of thousands of dollars on data recovery services just to sift through your decade-old browser cookies.
=Smidge=
If you live close to the sea, just dump the thing in seawater and forget about it. Nothing survives the sea.
Bit of buckshot will punch through in a pretty distructive and random fashion. Even the spindle will give to the force.
Repeat until you feel good about your destruction.
I DON'T recommend using them as clay pigeons though - they don't fly well.
2 things:
- shred (a dozen times with random crap)
and
- a hammer to be sure
There are really some voodoo and black magic that can recover data if you erase disk that way. Last time my colleague has to pay ~US$600 on his own accord to recover data on a harddisk he accidentally overwrote with a ghost image. We didn't call for rocket scientists's help, just paid a specialist and the data was back.
Sounds more like that the data wasn't overwritten, the specialist just located the data on the disk and assembled it together. That's a whole lot different thing than trying to recover data that was overwritten and it sure as hell would cost a four-figure number, not ~$600.
Also, you would like to be aware of the fault-tolerant design of modern harddisk that might replicate data in hidden storage, which might be up to 15% of the published space. So, erase 7 times with patterns, degauss, or even physical destroy is really necessary for erasing sensitive data.
Not needed. A single ATA "secure erase" command is enough as that command also clears out remapped bad sectors and other areas only the drive itself can access.
Store some really important, not-backuped data on them. I will guarantee you: thanks to Murphy's law they will be FUBARed in no time!!! :)
2. Spend some more of your time and a lot of computer time scrambling the bits, so that you can sell the disk at whatever people are willing to pay for a second hand harddisk
More like: hook the disk up to Linux box and issue ATA secure erase. Go watch movie, play games or whatever. (You can even use the same computer where the disk is doing the erase as it's the disk's own internal controller that does it so even using 100% CPU at all times on the machine wouldn't slow it down nor does the erase use CPU time at all.) Come back a few hours later and pick up the disk.
The ATA Secure Erase is a function built in to most drives to wipe them. NIST 800-88 (pdf warning) shows that apparently it's on par with degaussing in terms of recovery.
How to wipe in Linux
CMMR link from the PDF (Windows software)
I've done it (for fun, not security), with more than 20 pounds on a long handle (think lever action). Not only do you miss a small target often, the first blow basically just bends the case some. Little fuckers are sturdy. And once you have cracked it open after the third or fourth low, you are no better off than just taking it apart with a power screwdriver, that is, you have a set of platers that are more recoverable than even a simple wipe. In the end you are no faster than stuffing 4 to 8 drives into a case at a time and running DBAN on default options (e.g. no time at all after it boots is spent), which you can do throughout your workday instead of going out somewhere where you don't damage the parking lot with all the raw data in your trunk.
Just shows once to your (young) nephew who is basically trustworthy how to get the very powerful magnet inside the drive. Switch nephew when he become tired to play with magnets. It worked for me for more than 30 drives so far.
A pile driver. There's two ways to do it. You put the drive on top of the pile, or you put the drive underneath.
no, I don't have a sig
how about a hard drive speaker?
http://www.instructables.com/id/Hard-Drive-Speaker-System/
Or do this.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
don't you need a valid license for each drive then? :)
I am not really here right now.
Stop calling people a bozo you weird, paranoid cocksucker.
You really think that you can recover data after erasing with zeros? The only thing that suggests this comes from companies that destroy data.
An angle grinder with any metal-cutting bit will slice clean through the platters and circuit boards, making a pretty shower of sparks. It's much more satisfying than just using a drill, and at least as effective as swinging a big hammer on them.
BTW, remember that destroying hard drives could easily be construed as "willful destruction of evidence" if you're later accused of anything (terrorism, copyright violation, or other heinous crimes). So, whatever method you choose, it might be advisable to destroy them out of the public eye...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Platters are made of glass these days, so this is what I do: Take a long power lead, spin the drive up to full speed and smash it against the floor as hard as you can. Power off and shake the drive to hear the results. The platters have turned into sand.
What's so hard in doing: cat /dev/random >/dev/sda
/. and a normal guy wouldn't need to delete stuff this way. He would be running windows, in which case he would just delete the files, and fill the HDD with movies he downloads from $bittorrent-site or mp3 from his friends. A normal guy isn't MFM paranoiac.
Please don't serve us the "normal people don't know" thing here: we're on
Bulk erasure method using a .50 cal.
Usually happens when I get a scorching case of chlamydia. I'm not certain how you will give an STD to a hard drive, but... well, post it on YouTube when you figure it out.
Simply fill one drive's case with a slurry of U235. Fill a 2nd drive with Pt. Using a standard redneck-houshold brick of C4, arrange them in a pipe so that one will slam into the other, propelled by the C4. This will erase your data. The only problem with this method is needing to have an even number of hard drives. Make sure and use a really long fuse.
The "wrong" moderation is not required because some are glass as you would have noticed if you've read about them or even better pulled some apart (and broken a platter or two - fracture surface looks like glass and is even transparent in the uncoated bits). They make good mirrors apart from the hole in the middle.
A "not always right" mod may apply because not all of them are glass, but I never said they were but I suppose somebody attempting to read too much between the lines could assume I meant that with "It's glass in those drives". Maybe I should have written "a hell of a lot of drives have glass in them" but somebody that's never looked inside or read anything about their manufacture or never found some other way to get the merest fucking clue would probably still "correct" me before finding that even Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_platter) is a good enough source!
What I don't know however is if it's haematite or magnetite on the surface of those platters since I've never stuck one under a microscope - anybody here know? It's obviously an oxide since fingerprints on the polished surface don't corrode and fingerprints on polished steel (and ferrite) corrode quickly enough that you can almost see it happening.
he'll round kick that crap to hell!
If you are not averse to tinkering with electronics and have a little spare time you could create a propeller clock. Or a slick 16-segment POV hard drive clock.
Otherwise just drill a few holes through the drives (possibly through the platters).
if you are paranoid, zero it, then format it with a file system and attach it to your laptop/PC for reuse.
You keep the drive, you know it has been wiped and it is still useful.
Deleted
OK I know I am old but the only way to destroy them and have the most fun is to beat the crap out of them with a 9 pound sledge. Beat them until it sounds like a shaker inside. Or you could do what the US military did at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in MD back in the 80's. I had a friend who worked for the Space Telescope Institute and had a SG Onyx work station on his desk. He got it after he was at the proving ground and noticed that they had set up 10 of them on the firing range. He convinced the officer in charge that if he removed the HD from one of them he could keep the Onyx. The army blew away 9 Onyx's & one HD. They had been used for a secret weapons design project. Tax dollars blown away.
...pull the platters, and run them over a belt sander until you grind the top layers of the metal away...fin.
Torx screwdrivers and aviation snips...........Single pass of 0's.......disassemble drive ...salvage magnets........cut platters into small pizza wedges......mix platters into messy wet trash .....trash logic board on different pick-up day.....recycle metal case.....10-15 min per drive......
Drill a hole in the drive, completely through, and then get a 5 gallon bucket. Fill the bucket with about a gallon of drano water solution, and set the hard drive down in it and let it marinate overnight. The Drano will corrode the aluminum in the drive.
Why are you spending $20 on a caddy for 160gig when a new 1tb is $70? At that point it sounds more like keeping old hardware around whether or not it's purposeful. I agree that it's not worth completely junking decent drives unless you're extremely paranoid, or have been using them to store pirated content That said with new replacements being so cheap I just can't justify the increased risk of failure if they're doing anything important. I trust the old hdds for my minecraft/mumble/irc server, but definitely not with my backups or the box I do my day to day work/play on.
[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]
Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
I can't stand "security" people in business in general with this impulsive urge to physically destroy hard drives because of the data they stored.
I suspect it's because of NSA/DOD, which has very specific rules for how to destroy data. NSA did studies 30+ years ago and found a simple overwrite wasn't always sufficient. (Keep in mind back then you could prolly read the data with iron filings and a magnifying glass, so magnetic remanence was rather more plausible than today.) And since 2007, overwrite hasn't been acceptable at all. It's degaussing or physical destruction only. Whether this is due to some special recovery technique, or just because hard disks are smart and people are dumb, only the NSA knows, and they aren't telling.
But if you're not protecting classified national security information, it does seem rather likely to be overkill.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why are you spending $20 on a caddy for 160gig when a new 1tb is $70?
Because you don't actually need more than 160GB and it saves you $50?
(+1, Disagree)
Disassemble the drives then take the platters and housing down to your local metal recycling center. Destroyed drives AND some pocket cash.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Get ahold of an ANGLE GRINDER, Get a good pair of goggles and a good dust mask
If you disassemble the drives and pull the platters then hout old onto the platter with a pair of pliers or a vice and grind the platter to dust... should only take a min or two (if that... 100% unrecoverable even if they have access to a clean room and recovery tools). and you can take the aluminum casing to a metal recycler (granted it wont make you rich but you should get a few bucks for solid blocks of aluminum),
If you dont disassemble the drives take the angle grinder right through then center of the drive. (destroyed to the normal person but still recoverable by individuals with access to a clean room and drive recovery tools.
use a drill. The bigger the better. More often.
Why run DBAN on them? just write 1's to all locations and call it done. Stop listening to the IDIOTS online that say you have to overwrite with random data 900X to get a secure erase.
"You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive" - from that zero challenge URL.
I'm pretty sure anybody will agree that a zeroed drive is unrecoverable if you're not allowed to remove the platters.
That's not to say that you can recover data with the platters removed, but without disassembling the drive it's clearly impossible: you ask for a sector, you get a bunch of zeroes. There's nothing to do.
Fire Bad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5GKInPlOsg
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
At our office we have a policy for 'dead' drives. We remove the pcb, open the drive and remove teh platters, arm, motor, magnets and clean the rest of the components out. We then recycle the aluminum case. The platters get sorted into metal and glass. Metal ones are then used to make music by hitting them with hammers until no longer flat. Glass platters are shattered and stored to later be turned in for recycling. The remaining parts are cleaned of any recyclables and eventually turned in to the electronic scrap facility. If you have a metal scrap company in town that pays well, this can be a nice bit of side money for about 10 minutes of work.
Plus you get a couple of sweet magnets. A BFH also works if you're really in a hurry. I have a shot loaded 2 1/2 pound ball pein that will do the job. Unless the drive is of military interest denting the platter will do it.
All your database are belong to U.S.
http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Search?keyword=sledge+hammer&selectedCatgry=SEARCH+ALL&langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053&Ntpc=1&Ntpr=1
Are you under indictment or investigation? If not, nobody cares, throw them into the trash. And let's not be naive about how much actual recyling is done--even by the recycling companies.
E Proelio Veritas.
Here in Greece we have some volcanos that are easily accessible by the public and in fact some schools go there regularly. Last time I heard children went to either to the island of Nisyros or Santorini. There are plenty of holes to the ground that lava is visible. You can drop your hard drive there. Don't breath over the holes, I heard they smell terribly of brimstone. Don't fall inside. PS: Santorini is a great island to go to the summer, so perhaps you can combine those two activities.
I had a college buddy who studied forensics (hence - i dont know how FoS he was) but he claimed that strong magnets and even physical destruction could be at leasr partially recovered. enough for it to be still an issue - if say they were looking for something like like a CC number.
so if i had something that i was serious about destroying to a point that NOTHING could ever be recovered from it would i go with a variety of the suggestions pointed out above - that is some or all of: overwrite, magnet, drill, acid, steel wool, hammer, heat. probably in that order.
like my daughter, for instance
One word.....
"Thermite"
Why not just take them apart? Earlier ones use regular screws and some use that weird star shaped bit (which as a pc tech you should have).
Hard drives are very very easy to disassemble. Take the magnets out and save for future use and if your really paranoid take a hammer to the platters.
Assuming the information on the hard drives is just PII, but not
covered by HIPAA or some other government regulation, there are
three quick and easy ways to destroy them that I've used. All three
work at the "I have $10,000 to spend to recover the data" level of
disk recovery (i.e. the NSA probably could pull some data and
so could the FSB or Mossad, but not your local script kiddie).
1) Gun. Take 'em to the firing range and "pop a cap in 'em".
Preferably several rounds each. The idea is to bend the
platters enough that they can't be easily read. Note that this
is step 1 in "military decommissioning". It is also a lot
of fun.
2) Bandsaw. Cut the disks in half. This is much less fun
than it seems; you will spend more time than you expect
doing this. Wear eye and ear protection. Your local high
school or tech/voc probably has a bandsaw you can use.
Don't cut right through the hub, as the hardened steel ball
bearings will really mess up the blade. Cut to the side of
the hub only. DAMHIK.
3) Hydraulic press. This is what we currently use at work.
Just push a 4 cm. steel bar endwise through the middle of
the disk drive till it comes out the other end. We use a
20-ton press (from Harbor Freight - it's cheap enough
that we don't care), with both hand and pneumatic pumps, and
we can decommission a disk in about thirty seconds,
without even having to remove it from the server cage
sheet metal. Most machine shops as well as the
tech-voc highschool will have a hydraulic press in this
scale.
And I hate to whore my own company, but I do have a solution that works rather well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKQz6zFQ3Fc
An intern with a screwdriver and a 20# sledge hammer. May not stop the CIA, but no dumpster-diver's ever going to get anything off those drives.
-JS
It really depends on what you're trying to protect from discovery. The cost benefit analysis flows from there.
Data: Credit Card Numbers / Banking Info
Value: Zero to Thousands of Dollars
This is easily stopped by just deleting the files from explorer and emptying the recycle bin. Then throw the drives in the trash. Your risk exposure here is that someone with enough computer smarts to undelete a file with recovery utilities also decides to go swimming through the town dump on the off chance of them finding an unencrypted IDE drive. Not a pertinent risk.
Data: Evidence
Value: $10,000s - $100,000s
Ok, now you have to care about someone with real ability and motive. If you don't want your wife's divorce attorney to get those pictures of your pregnant mistress, you'll need to do a little more work. Ditto for the MAFIAA getting its hands on your kazaa folder or whatever. A simple delete of the file isn't enough, now you need to go zero out the drive's sectors. This will stop a random technician from finding anything of value. It's possible that a very good microscope could recover some of this data on older IDE drives, but services like that are beyond the reach of a simple lawsuit. They just cost too much.
Data: Top Secret Data
Value: Sky's the limit
Examples would be CIA agent lists, launch codes for a nuclear arsenal, complete B2 specs, or anything else with global ramifications. Now your attacker is happy to sift through trash, and can spend money on multimillion dollar microscopes and highly trained techs. Now you need to both zero out the drives, but also to stop any attempts to read the raw sectors for 1/2 erased data. Since you're trying to stop Jack Bauer, you might as well spend the money on some thermite and just turn the drive into slag. It's relatively easy to get your hands on it since you probably have your own top secret clearance and budget. This pretty much negates the need for any 'zero out the drive' malarkey, so skipping step 1 is optional.
You seem to assume that the drive is working. If so, then yes.
For cheap: take the shell off, break the platters & play with the magnets. Otherwise, just take a drill to them.
Unless these disks are inoperative (and you say using DBAN is an option so I guess they aren't), don't physically destroy them! One overwrite with any data - ones, zeroes or random - is enough to make the data unrecoverable on a hard drive made in roughly the last 20 years, according to US NIST (just be sure to use a tool that overwrites bad sectors as well). You can do two if you're super-paranoid. If you want to do more than that, seek professional help - psychiatric help, not IT help.
Then give the wiped disks to someone who could use them.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Shotgun with slugs. Will punch a hole about an inch across thru the drive, and after 3-4 of them there is no way anyone, even a 3 letter agency is recovering that. And its a lot of fun...
I am that much more enlightened and proportionally disillusioned
12 gauge.
No, you use thermite. I am not sure it is the cheapest (grinding it to metal dust might be cheaper), and it is definitely NOT the safest... but for sure it is one of the fastest, and THE coolest, most awesome way to be absolutely sure the data is irrecoverable even by aliens.
It takes me about 10 minutes to rip a drive apart while watching TV in the evening. Out of it I get 2 neodymium magnets and if I'm lucky a stack of platters. The older the drive the better. 80GB circa 1999 == 4 platters, 80GB circa 2002 == 1 platter. Put your platters in a box, shake them up to randomize them, and then take a few and make a windchime or 3.
I have had a 120GB windchime hanging on the porch for the last 2 years and have yet to have anyone try to recover the data off it.
Nobody else cares, they're happy to let those drives rot in a landfill. Nobody wants to recover your CP archive.
Years ago I took a big box full of 200MB SCSI drives I needed to dispose of to a rural firing range with some friends. I laid them out on the 50 yard berm and we spent a few hours plinking away at them, with AR-15's, AK-47 variants, shotguns, .357 magnum and such. Then about 30 minutes cleaning up the debris.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
-Dan
I agree. There are a lot of myths regarding storage sanitization. I do think it is too simplistic to say one pass of zeros will do the trick every time, but i'd give it a high probability of doing the job.
More interesting reading for the inclined: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/
A log splitter works 100% of the time. No doubt. No myths.
Take them to a machine shop and have them put in a 100 ton press. You will be amazed how rugged the drives are, in the long run the press will win.
http://www.willitblend.com/
Tannerite is a binary explosive available over the internet. Get yourself a decent rifle (even if you have to borrow it) and set the hard drive on top of a bottle of tannerite. Get back to 200 yards and fire away. Won't have a hard drive left AND you'll have had a great afternoon. For best results, remove the hard drive lid before ya do.
Pretend you are Thor and hit it multiple times with a big hammer.
You can make a kiln for almost nothing. Bury the drives in a barrel of sawdust, with large holes at the bottom of the barrel, and light it from the bottom. You can fire clay with a primitive kiln like that, it should be hot enough to melt the drives.
A blacksmith's forge can get hot enough to literally burn steel.
Free Martian Whores!
Just drill holes in the disk - all around. By doing this, and removing some of the components from the controller, the disk is completely destroyed.
But it all comes back to what you want to deny.. If you have serious material, that could land you in serious trouble/embarrasment, destroy it by wiping the disk, then remove the controller, destroy the motor bearings and the platters by using a bench press - then pour in some vinegar. Vinegar is much safer - but slower - method of removing the iron oxide from the platters.
Just pour it in, shake it around, and leave it for a few days. The environment will love you also - boric acid is nasty and dangerous stuff.
I did this exact job at my work for a year and a half. I still assist that group from time to time. Where I work we destroy hundreds of drives a day, so obviously we had a machine that would do the job.
For remote sites, however, it took us a while to come up with a good solution, so here's what we did in the meantime, and what you can do also, at home:
Get yourself a technical screwdriver set... yes, one that will work on those screws on the hard drive. Their exact name escapes me at the moment, as I just woke up. Since you know what I'm talking about anyway, get that. Exactly that.
Anyway, open up that puppy, and remove the platters from the spindle.
Generally your platters should be metal. If this is a rare case where they are glass, smashy smashy. If not, get some vice grips, channel locks, pliers, whatever is handy, and fold that platter over like a taco.
We sent a sample like this around to all the major data recovery outfits and they all quoted 5 figure sums with zero guarantees. They probably could get some data off it, but who is going to pay $10k+ to find out?
At that point, is the data secure? About as secure as you can make it without some crazy.
We would do other things after that point, but it was mostly out of due diligence/paranoia than actual data security.
Sig missing. Reward.
Just drop the drives into the water with the sharks, and... zzzzt!
We took our old ones to the shooting range - 17 HMR, 45, 9mm, 223 from an AR-15...
Defence contractors are required to put the drives in the compactor and crush them.
Bye Bye Drive... Bye Bye Data...
My AR-15 does a nice job on them. If you want to be safer, you can move up to a .308. They make great targets :)
Thermite if you have any of that. If you have a big spool of wire you could wrap a coil around the drives then hook that coil up to your car battery, the resulting field should wipe it. If you have a big field, long extension cord and an old microwave... well you can imagine the rest.
Also, most government facilities have an incinerator, find out the next time they might spool up one of these and toss yours in.
You can also just get a program that writes a 1 and then a 0 a could times to each sector which does the same things but can be very slow. If the drive is under 20GB, just have fun destroying it.
Making sure you trash the platters with the hammer.
Dispose of in a big bucket filled with salt water.
I challenge anyone to recover the data after this. While it might be theoretically possible, I doubt it can be done practically.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Next question?
First off you can get a cheap degausser for CRT picture tubes online. These work great if you take the drive apart. Second if you grind off the top layer of the platters with an angle grinder it significantly reduces the magnetic fields. Lastly if you cut the platters into several pieces and toss them in various garbage cans around town, someone would have to go through a lot of trouble to get all the pieces and put them back together.
Head down to your local auto wrecking or junk yard. Get the operator of the crane to pick up your drives with the electro-magnetic crane. Drop drives in the trash.
Load Linux on it.
End of day:
1 Nail
1 Hammer
Place nail on drive. Hit with hammer.
If nails are unavailable, move to sledgehammer.
Simple. Quick. Quality.
Thermite. Cheap to make, fun to use, and the if the patters are exposed at all, it'll render the drive completely unreadable. Just don't breathe in the fumes.
What about just throwing them in the trash and taking the risk that the odds are low that in the time between your disposal and they wind up in an landfill someone who cares about the data will find it and recover the data and do something with it.
The landfill is the cheapest way to destroy. But if you don't like that risk that hammer and punch suggestion seemed fast and easy.
1. Take the hard drive and put the biggest magnet you can find to it.
2. Drill holes in the drive platters.
3. Soak it in a bucket of water for a while
4. apply heat to it. (camp fire)
5. smash the burn drive's with a hammer and burn again.
6. spread ashes over your favorite camp site.
While this all seems very exciting...
The proper thing to do is take the cover off and remove the platters (I think it's a #9 Torx typically). Damage just those disks.
The magnets are great on the fridge (super strong so be careful). There are some people that have made wind generators out of those magnets.
The cast aluminum housings are a high grade and valuable at a nearby recycler. But you have to get ALL the iron (screws) out of it or else you just made low grade aluminum (still worthwhile to recycle).
The electronics board has lead solder and some precious metals in the chips and so the board should go to a local electronics recycler.
.
We take them to our private range and use them as targets. You would be amazed at how much damage old military steel core ammo can do to a hard drive. I've got a display in my office right now of 4 drives that we have shot with a variety of weapons.
Some physicists think that not even black holes can destroy information in a quantic level, making it possible to deterministically revert any physical destruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox But if you are not that paranoid, drill a hole and pour some muriatic acid in it.
So say we all
For DoD, physical destruction is the only acceptable method. Disassemble and remove the magnetic material from the platters (sandblast, belt sander, etc don't breathe the dust). Then destroy any NVRAM in the electronics. The overwrite method hasn't been approved for over a decade, due to modern drives reallocating bad sectors and lying to the controller.
For my financial records, I'd trust a sledgehammer, punch, bullet hole through the platter. I'd trust DBAN wiping if I wanted to sell the used drives on ebay.
I've seen acid mentioned. I'm not sure I'd want to deal with the leftovers.
For most anything else my data isn't worth the effort. Just format it.
A friend and I used to take hard drives out into the woods and use them for target practice. 7.62mm armor piercing rounds turn the platters into metal confetti. AP rounds are a bit expensive, hollow points may do the trick. I used to work as a contractor for the DoE at the Savannah River Site. They used to make weapons grade plutonium there back in the day and currently just make tritium. Needless to say, highly classified data. We would take the hard drives out of the computers and put four holes in them with a drill press.
Coarse-grit belt sander on each ferrous side of each platter. Works every time.
As the "security" person, what you suggests makes sense until you realize that the hammer/drill method takes a unskilled grunt less than a minute to do, and the "wipe with zeros" method takes hours, even for a single pass, and a skilled technician to do.
.. the additional revenue from selling the 4-5 year old unit intact with disk - the time invested to render that disk "safe" for sale does not come out to more than we get for selling it all as scrap.
.. policy states "all storage devices, including those in printers, copiers, and networking devices, will be physically destroyed before sent for recycling or disposed as scrap".
I have about 400 pounds of hard drives (many of them 100+gb FC disks out of an EMC SAN) that are all headed to the bandsaw. We have done the math on this many times
It's not an "impulsive instinct to destroy", it's a business economics decision.
Sure, we've had plenty of organizations say "give it to us, we'll send a guy to sit there and wipe them for you", but as a business, you can't trust them to *really* do it, and supervising that it got done loops back to the same time=money problem.
Hence
Nothing personal.
This is a good opportunity to catch some lightning. Take a bunch of mylar balloons and use some strong but thin wire for the string. Connect the wire to the hard drives and the balloons and connect another wire to the bottom of the hard drives and drive it into the ground. Release the balloons during a major lightning storm and back away quickly.
You can get a cheap rock tumbler for $100 or less. Pull the platters out of your drives and put them in the tumbler along with some coarse grit pellets and turn it on for a few days. For extra security throw some crushed up magnets in also. You'll strip the magnetic parts right off the disk and be left with shiny metallic platters devoid of information...if they don't disintegrate completely.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I found a couple of good firm swings of my trusty garden mattock using the pick side gets old hard drives into non-recoverable mode before throwing the remains into the trash can. Plus it's very satisfying! :- ) I am sure if you're an international spy then the CIA could probably retrieve the data, but if you're just trying to destroy your hard drive to the point of stopping a local teenager fishing it out of your trash can and retrieving your amazon transactions and credit card data, I reckon this probably does the job...
If you (or someone you know) has access to any form of arc welder, you could run a bead across each platter. They will physically melt near the weld pool, and a pretty nasty EMF is thrown off in its vicinity. Alternatively, you can find dramatic (and potentially dangerous) melting of hard drives using thermite on YouTube.
A ten pound sledge, some serious anger issues and a free afternoon should do the trick.
My company writes software for the document storage/destruction industry, and a lot of our customers are the "data destruction" firms you referred to. We just call them "shredders," but usually they perform other services too, such as document warehousing. Quite often, these are the same guys that pick up and deliver your backup tapes for offsite storage. Amongst other things, they employ large industrial shredding machines designed specifically for turning whole hard drives into a pile of little metal fragments. The owners of the materials they destroy receive what is known in the industry as a "Certificate of Destruction," which is basically a legally binding receipt that guarantees your data is toast. As they are legally liable, they are completely trustworthy. And if that's not reassuring enough, as someone else already mentioned, they really aren't interested in any specific material they handle because they have so much that they have to process. They make their money by destroying a lot quickly, so taking the time to inspect anything they handle is really a waste of time.
Connect them to a machine with a file sharing client and fill them to capacity with download music. Then wait for the RIAA investigators to show up. The drives will be removed to a secure location and held until the bits rot off.
SD
... just open up the drives and work on the plates with a combination of tools such as a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, router, drill, and/or hacksaw. Even if you don't separate the pieces, there's a pretty good chance that nothing you have on those drives would ever be worth the cost and hassle to attempt to recover. If it actually IS that important, than hooking them up long enough to run dd on it a few times would not be out of the question.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Let a two year kid play with it.
photosMy Photostream
If you write zeros everywhere then you've only overwritten half the data.
My father is not technical, but he really enjoy using his welding machine to destroy some old HDDs for me!
Sledgehammer and random scrap metal yard. Who in their right mind is going to try to pull data from bent and scratched platters thrown in a pile of other garbage.?
Put a drill to them, shatters the platters
Axe. Srsly.
Donky Kong style.
Your colleague did not get back 100% of the files that were on the system before the overwrite. They only got back what was still resident that didn't get overwritten by the ghost image restore. The ghost image only had the used portions of the drive copied, it did not have a full image of the drive.
I'd also be inclined to question: how much do you really need to destroy this data? What are you hiding? State secrets? Credit card information? Your porn-watching habits? Or your music collection?
A lot of times this stuff really boils down to "I don't really need to protect this data very thoroughly, but going through insane security measures makes me feel like I'm some kind of super-spy." In that case, it isn't security, it's ego-stroking.
Lots of folks own oxy-acetylene welding/cutting torches.... just sayin'
I trash 10+ a year. This is how its done. Drill a 1/4 right through the drive so its hits all the platters on the way through and comes out the other side. Then pitch them in the dumpster.
http://www.harborfreight.com/6-ton-a-frame-bench-shop-press-1666.html
has "other" uses
Go get yourself an acetylene torch set and start cutting away.
End Transmission....
454 Casull 300gr JHP XTP-MAG takes care of them quite nicely.
Someone check me on this, but the easiest DOD approved method is to use a drill a hole through the housing/platter. This exposes the HDD to the elements, spreads platter shavings across the platter (which lightly scrambles the magnetic field ), and puts A HOLE through your data. That makes it pretty hard to recover from.
The other option is to simply dismantle the drive. This has the added value is that you can then take out the rare-earth magnet. These little widgets have a whole mess of uses.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
I take my cordless drill after it!
I have heard that FBI experts can get data out of trashed hard drive almost always. Unless people bake them for more than 4 hours at 300F.
There's a command in the IDE and SATA spec just for this, called Secure Erase. Just get a program that can run it. It wipes everything, including reallocated sectors, the whole 9 yards.
Use your favorite drive wipe tool followed by good old fashioned kinetic attack. Destroy data and relieve work / relationship / child induced stress at the same time. Using 1 per week you have quite a bit of stress relief at your disposal. Enjoy!
Go to your local Public or University Library, chances are they have a degausser as part of their book security system...
Then smash those fuckers with a hammer
But will it Blend?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
First just the technical aspect of how drives work and why the whole magic "read overwritten data" thing is BS. Look up EPRML, which is the method modern drives use to write, and learn about it first. If it sounds kinda like voodoo, well, it is :). The upshot of it though is that it deals with extremely low SNR stuff. You don't have nice clear, defined, bits. As such when you lower that SNR, by writing over it, you are screwed in terms of recovery.
The other part to understand is that you are not that important. Nobody gives a shit about your data. You wipe it so someone doesn't stumble across it. I mean after all, someone might look at the drive to see what's there just because. However nobody is going to target you, they just don't care.
So stop thinking like you have to act like the NSA with regards to keeping things secure. You don't. They go overboard with their data destruction because they are institutionally paranoid and because the data they protect is very valuable and many people would go to great lengths to get. Your data? Not so much. Anyone who cared enough to have some mythical system that can recover data from an overwritten drive (something no commercial recovery firm has) would get it some other way. Given that you are probably just some guy, well they could just hire a couple people with shotguns to kick in your door and steal your shit.
We just taco the platters with a 50-ton brake press and smash the logic boards with hammers when we're frustrated.
Thirded here - if someone is REALLY interested in what's on your computer there are far easier ways than fishing your old HDD out of the trash. Zero it and have done. If you want to be sure it won't work again, just hit the circuit board with a hammer.
Tons of different adhesives would be good enough for "more than casual" harddrive destruction. JB Weld? Epoxy? Cyanoacrilate gel? The possibilities are endless. http://www.thistothat.com/
Since everyone is coming up with odd ball destruction methods, I say dump them.
Drill a hole in each one then charter a boat to go off shore and toss 'em in the ocean in deep water.
Gone forever.
No matter where you go, there you are.
As others have said: you one gives are crap about your "special" data. Just smash 'em with a hammer, and throw them away, you pretentious douche.
To Degauss, Shred, or Burn the old HDD/SSD is the question.
Degauss and reuse, shred and recycle, burn and bury the old HDD/SDD.
http://www.datadev.com/degausser-government-nsa-dod-approved-data-security-erase.html
http://www.americanrecycler.com/0510/223spotlight.shtml
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4147847319296070400
http://hackaday.com/2008/09/16/how-to-thermite-based-hard-drive-anti-forensic-destruction/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ckechIqW0
The burn and bury is fun and some think best.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Shoot it. Shoot it alot :)
it is about the size of a heart, small animal, bird, rude neighbor's head
just let your imagination soar
destroys data and improves marksmanship at the same time
it is even a form of recycling.
how green is that?
i'm sorry, but i just don't see a downside to this answer
You're right. All you need is 1 random pass.
Now, please tell me how to do 1 random pass when my control board has died.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I can't stand "security" people in business in general with this impulsive urge to physically destroy hard drives because of the data they stored.
It's the same reason kids want to blow up their green Army men with firecrackers. Destruction is fun. In my experience, one rarely disposes of a drive with any usefulness left in it - too small, too slow, too IDE - so the drive is already destined for a landfill/recycler. The drive is already wasted resources, and the only question is whether it can provide some entertainment as a swan song, and more violence is more entertaining.
Nuke the entire hard drive from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure.
A couple years ago I had a friend that had all his valuable photos on a second partition on his hard drive and when he filled up his primary partition I helped him burn them off to DVDs and combine the partitions into one. A few months later the DVDs were lost and I tried every tool I could find to recover the data from the old partition (the computer had hardly been used), but the partitioning software had "cleared the free space" after combining, wiping out any traces of the data. I then contacted every drive recovery company and even drive manufacturer I could think of and nobody could help even though my friend was willing to pay any cost to recover the data.
DBAN definitely supports multiple drives at the same time. I was recently tasked with disposing of a couple hundred old drives, so I slapped an old 8-channel RAID card in a computer, hooked up the drives as JBOD and let DBAN fly. I was surprised it only took a couple days, even with bad drives in the chain DBAN would keep on nuking the good ones.
Most people don't care about your data. The fastest, easiest way to destroy the drive is to hit it a couple of times with a hammer. Smash the circuit board and put a couple of good dents in the top, and no one is going to bother messing with it. It should only take about 10 sec. If you're dealing with irrational people or irrational policies, it's a different story. I worked at a university one summer that wanted hard drives destroyed in an approved way, but they never bothered specifying what that approved way was. We overwrote them with pseudorandom data and threw them in a pile under the workbench. Eventually I got tired of them being there and I took them apart one at a time. I took the board off and smashed it. Then I took the lid off, removed each platter, and bent it until it broke. I kept the magnets because they were awesome and threw the rest in the trash. I figured it was sufficient, but it was kind of a waste of time even though it was fun.
Why not use Secure Erase from CMRR which is much quicker and more secure than DBAN?
I find it extremely cathartic to take them to the range and use them as targets. I can confirm that the standard hard drive is unable to stop a 12 ga slug or a 7.62x39 FMJ round.
If it only burns a small hole, you aren't using enough.
A power drill with a large carbide bit will make many wonderful holes in a drive platter.
Go Office Space on them. Best = Most fun.
Die Mother F'er Die Mother F'er Die
Other than that, nobody cares what is on your old hard drives. If you make them non functioning by damaging the electronics or drilling in to the platter to cause some physical damage, nobody is going to go to the trouble of trying to recover it.
Also, don't cook them; while letting the smoke out will destroy the drives, it could also be toxic.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If you live in a large city there will be one or more companies that do data destruction for corporations in your city that need to meet various standards for contracts they are working on, often for the government. Most of this will be bulk paper shredding and the like, but most will also do hard drives. Many will let you show up at the site and watch your hard drive go in the machine and get spit out in shreds, if you care. They are all certified (I forget the standard), they will bar code the drive, inventory it, and then shred it, and give you a certificate with the inventory numbers and serials confirming they were destroyed. The service is cheap if you don't make them come pick them up, I think around $10 a drive for single quantities.
However, I'm mostly with the other folks in this thread. If you write over with zeros in a pass or two pretty much anyone except the NSA won't stand a chance of recovering any data. Even someone like the NSA would only do it if there was no other way, due to the cost of getting that data. Basically, no one cares about you enough, unless you're like a major drug kingpin or something on the side.
I degauss mine, only because work has a machine (from years ago) so it's "free" and only takes a couple of minutes...but I also only do it on dead drives. If I have a drive I'm just not using right now I write zeros to it and store it to be used as a scratch drive. Only after it won't spin up anymore does it get degaussed.
The other DIY method mentioned is to drill a quarter inch hole in the platters with a drill press. Pro data recovery companies could get some data off for lots (10's of thousands) of money unless you drill like 20 holes it in, but it would keep any non-pro users from reading the drive.
Overwrite them and be happy. Shred them and know the stuff that comes out the back end at least gets recycled. It's all about your paranoia level.
Yeah, I wouldn't think a home oven would be high enough. I say take the platters out of the drive and use a belt sander or grinder and just strip off the oxide.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
There lies within the ATA command set, a command called Secure Erase. This is a very quick, single pass data wipe of the entire hard drive that is as effective (if not more) than military grade overwrites. There are several free utilities such as HDDErase that support this command and it's worth a look.
Is that a pun?
.45 ACP Works nicely
clay pot
thermite
torch
Ideally, the data would be encrypted either in hardware or software, then all you have to do is a cryptographic erase, instantly your data is incomprehensible. Best of all, the drive itself is unharmed, and can be safely donated.
Failing that, screwdriver to open (which should do enough damage already, dirt particles destroy disks), then hammer to shatter the platters, effective, but then the drive isn't reusable.
The best way overall is to dismantle them, and melt the platters. Most platters are composed of an Aluminum alloy (~660 Celsius max melting point). The media layer that actually stores the data can vary widely between manufacturers, and product lines (Usually based on a Cobalt Chromium alloy with Platinum or Tantalum). There is no reasonably easy way to get the curie point, or the coercivity of the platters. The curie point (temperature at which the magnetic domains randomize) varies widely due to composition, and the parameters of the CVD, or PVD process, as does the coercivity (which determines the strength of the magnetic field needed to degauss the platters). The curie point of a thin film (~micron) media layer is usually substantially less than the 'bulk' curie point of the alloy, and it may be that the thin film curie point is lower than the melting point of the substrate, however it still would be a feat to find this information for each drive that you needed to wipe. So if you melt the substrate layer, then the particles left over from the media layer will be randomly oriented (even if they haven't been 'erased' by the heat), and so there would be no way to recover the data from them. You would need some torx screwdrivers, and either an oven (that gets hot enough, not an oven for baking), or a propane torch (1,000 Celsius / 1800 Fahrenheit). I use the Craftsmen variety, but they can have a tendency to break in the middle as they aren't 'full tang', they will work alirght if you are careful though. Using software can be alright, though you can't really be sure the data is gone, since the first data written gets the deepest, and widest recorded track, there may be a thin area of the data track where previously written information is still stored. Also as Peter Gutmann described it is unknown what encoding scheme is used, his 35 pass method is only suggested for PRML encoded drives, he recommends as many passes as feasible of pseudo-random data for today's hard drives. Dismantling, and melting is easier, and more assured imo.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
However, with the ones that aren't usable, I would suggest ceremoniously throwing them into a volcano, thus appeasing The Ancient Earth Gods and preventing the simultaneous eruption of every volcano on December 22, 2012.
It was his MOST BIZARRE PR0N, he would have wanted to to take it with him...
HDs are trivially cheap. It's easy to verify destruction, and a quick shot with a hammer will smash the platters without even bothering with a punch. Deform the case into them. Large ball pein for teh win.
The customer can "see" their data is destroyed.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The cost of a data leak incident far outweighs any money to be made or recovered by selling the old hardware or giving it to charity. Better safe than sorry.
Send them to me, I will do it for you for a small fee...
The Gov't method for getting rid of devices - Disintergrator.
For personal use (i.e. free as in beer, and easy) I found that encrypting a drive is much faster than wiping a drive. Take Truecrypt and encrypt the drive with a very long passphrase - 60 to 64 characters. Some software allows you to wipe out the encryption key, basically making the drive a brick - which is a better option (with no key to crack it is almost impossible to recover).
A rare earth (Neodybium sp?) magnet to the platters, and then a drill... Takes all of 2 minutes to do...
Damage the controller cards and throw the drives out with your nastiest kitchen debris.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
My suggestion is do a single pass overwrite with all zeros, then download all the internet porn you can find onto the disk and do a "quick" format. No one will look any further.
pull out the platters and melt them.
1 - Install Windows
2 - Randomly go to at least 10 Websites.
3 - Reboot system
That will trash most hard drives.
Throw down a wood block, put HD on block, apply sledge. Two or three good strikes and you're set.
http://alan-parekh.com/projects/hard-drive-clock/
Stop by any local metal fabricator - give buddy a six-pack and have him smush them in a press. Takes 5 seconds, and if you put them in standing on edge, they smush up real good. smush.
My last HD met its death via axe. It's kind of fun -- Office Space style.
Baseball bat. Aluminum; the casing tends to gouge wood. Wear a mask though, as you probably don't want to inhale the sparkly bits that float through the air. More fun than a hammer!
Slow, but sure.
Notice that DBAN might actually not be an option for him as he says in the post that he no more has any IDE hardware to plug such disks to. Ok, he could get some, but it'd be a bit of a hassle.
You could disassemble the drive, take out the platters, and then toss them in a public waste bin. Or scatter them into the trash cans of several neighbors. Done. They'll wind up in a public dump somewhere and never be found again.
That is unless someone is actively tracking you right now. If you're worried about something coming back a year later though, that stuff will be long gone.
There's still an issue with MFP copy machines being sold and re-provisioned to other businesses. Scanned medical documents buffered on the drives can still be recovered for many of the units. Only the newer machines (or updated firmware) will encrypt the data on writes. But often they're expensive so they're not replacing the refurbished units quick enough. It will be another 10+ plus years before they get flushed out of the market would be my guess.
Point being. I'm curious to know if hipaa compliance now requires taking the drives out of the machines, or having written certification the data buffered in these copy machines will be securely wiped.
Life is not for the lazy.
Use the Eraser available at http://eraser.heidi.ie/. It's a free GNU GPL open source HDD wiper available for Windows systems. If your drive is not windows based, format it in NTFS, and plug it into a Windows machine as an external drive and use the Eraser to wipe it clean.
Any gross physical method to damage the disc. .45 ACP applied liberally. noisy, dangerous and fun!)
(my favorite
Install Windows Vista on it.
Just dd'em with 0s and donate them to any geek oriented institution for the raid/cloud storage.
dban.org
Careful you don't wipe the data you want to keep, too.
The decryption of any current key would be trivial for anybody who can come even remotely close to data remanence recovery.
And the overhead of full-disk encryption over it's life is far greater than the time it takes to do a full wipe at the end.
Being concerned about someone with a magnetic force microscope reconstructing your drive literally bit-by-bit is actually MORE insane than being worried about aliens with time travel capability arriving on Earth to rape your data in the past.
It's also less likely than said aliens appearing.
Just copy random data over the drive, put it aside for a while, and then zero it out later. So long as there's nothing critical stored in spared sectors, it's 100% safe. Also note that in really old hard drives, sparing does NOT HAPPEN.
Donate them to add to my wall. http://sacramento.craigslist.org/wan/2624342850.html I will pay shipping.
But running three passes (all ones, random, all zeros) reduces the S/N ratio, even though you know the data put down in the three passes is enough to make it unrecoverable.
Sure, writing 0s to the drive makes the data unrecoverable and works fine if you're taking care of your own drives. But would you give those drives to someone else to wipe and trust they did so? I wouldn't. If I ask someone to make 12 drives unreadable, I want to see 12 carcasses in return. I don't want to verify they were wiped, I want to KNOW they are unreadable. If I give someone 1,000 drives ... this is even more the problem.
If you right random data, you risk reproducing copy-written material!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Office Space style
F--! If you write random data...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
1. Pry off case with screwdriver.
2. Smash plates to bits with hammer.
3. Profit.
Just remove the platters and let some kindergarteners play with them on the playground. Sure to be destroyed in no time. Also, give the magnets to your local high school science class. In seriousness, if you remove the platters and dispose of them separately from the drive cases, you are almost guaranteed no recovery. Anyone who comes across it and can read it without the associated heads and drive electronics is a serious three-letter agency and what the hell have you done to draw their attention?
DBAN does nothing for you when you have a drive that won't spin up or that's heads are stuck. Yes, you might not have much experience with it with the number of drives you have in your mother's basement, but when you are a 'security' IT person you probably work with large companies which have lots of servers with lots of storage. IN that case you end up with lots of drives that have had a mechanical failure. Physical destruction is the only way to ensure data destruction.
Why is this question so frequent? If you are posting here, you most likely read articles here and have seen the solution of "KILL IT WITH FIRE/hammer/nuke etc..." over and over again.
The answer to this question depends on your criteria across multiple dimensions that may or may not include: effectiveness, cost, duration, spectacle, personal satisfaction and possibly others.
But you appear to want all three options of cheap, fast and effective maxed out.
That isn't going to happen. DBAN, a sledgehammer or a metal-cutting saw/angle grinder, will probably be effective and cheap but time consuming.
Fast and effective options will involve 3rd parties and/or not be cheap. For example, thermite. :)
Cheap and fast will usually involve taking someone's word they will destroy your data for you. You sound too paranoid for that.
300,000 hrs = 34.2 years! You might want to double check the specs. I'm betting the 300,000 hrs is MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), which is not directly related to MTTF. MTBF = (total # failures)/(total # hrs). FYI,
I had two clients in the electronic data discovery business and both laughed when I asked about zeroing a drive. According to them, all they do is alter the track pattern and they can pick up the data very easily. They said to physically destroy it with a sledgehammer.
I am Homer of Borg, resistance is - Ooo Donuts!
A masons sledge hammer. It's like a regular sized hammer only it has a sledge head instead of ballpeen. Instructions. Flatten till like a pancake or piece of sheet metal. Toss in trash. good for keeping biceps in shape also. So you get physical exercise as a bonus.
Mark "FRAGILE" and ship via UPS.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
7.62x51 works pretty well.
the most environmentally friendly way to treat any appliance is to reuse it. Many many carbon dioxide molecules were created and many many toxic chemicals were released into the environment to produce it. So just wipe it and sell it or donate it to some poor third world charity
- Yes, the firms can be trusted - caveat pay attention to ToS. Take note of which ones will certify destruction of the drive, some even cover PCI liability.
- You can run DBAN (or similar tools!) yourself, from any system w the right connects, on as many drives as the chipset can manage. Then you can resell or donate drives. Yes it takes some time, but unless it's a drive that predates UDMA, it's not going to take too long unless there are r/w errors - in which case just punt it to the next method.
- Power drill + hard drive = pretty sparks. Alternatively, you can just disassemble the drive - I find the metal platters make very nice coasters.
ps: Degaussing is not considered sufficient for business use, so if you're concerned about data destruction it's not the route to go.
Car Battery + Jumper Cables + HDD = unusable chunk of metal
Have fun!
Can we stop answering it, already? Wanna degauss your shit? It's as simple as finding a pair of Oster heavy-duty hair clippers.
Sticky this answer for all time and quit letting this fucking question get submitted every few months.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Use a 1/2" Drill bit and drill a hole all the way through the hard drive. Case and platters. Next, submerge the hard drive in a strong acid. It will be destroyed.
and take off the damned tinfoil hat.
Very important! Magnetic fields of that strength plus aluminum could hurt.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The problem is the opportunity cost. You know which hard drives have sensitive data on them, but your some punk doesn't. Moreover, even your hard drives with sensitive data on them probably have lots of other stuff on them too, such as an operating system. If you're worried about database data, how likely is it you have Oracle and Oracle's data in the same place? An Oracle data partition without the corresponding configuration isn't particularly useful. But how many punks do you know who go out to the dump and root around for hard drives, take them all home, plug them in and go surfing for useful data? It would be a huge amount of work.
Even supposing this punk finds your product source code on there, what's he going to do with it? Just fire up gcc and stick it in the app store? Running a business is hard work. I know a writer who constantly worries about his computer being hacked into, yet can't find a publisher himself for his own work. I try to point out that getting published is hard work, why would somebody go to all that effort to live so poorly when they could just get a job?
Moreover, if this punk really wants your credit cards, why would he bother rooting around in your trash when he could just sniff your wifi and wait for you to make a purchase somewhere stupid, or send you a phishing email? For that matter, I doubt it's very hard to go to IRC somewhere and say "I need a thousand credit cards"; credit cards are not stolen individually these days when they can instead be stolen and sold in bulk.
I certainly see a need for proper, secure hard drive erasure for government or military secrets, but in industry, I certainly agree with the OP: the sheer quantity of boring data out there is itself a wonderful deterrent, and a simple one-pass write of zeros is enough to raise the opportunity cost of finding valuable data well beyond the threshold of "some punk" rooting through your trash.
Whenever I teach the Computer Merit Badge, I start with a couple of old hard drives. I pass them out and supply tools. Within 30 minutes the the drives are history. Wires are pulled out and examined. The platters are bent, scratched and shuffled. The magnets are gone. They go home with REFRIGERATOR MAGNETS FROM HELL. Best of all, the boys are eager to learn more.
I find a maul and a sledge work well enough unless you have classified data. Hit it twice and it leaves the platters dented and unusable. Of course if you have classified data then the only solution is running them through a shredder.
Put in box...mark fragile....give to postman.
you can destroy it using an arc welding machine for example and/or you can put it into a grinding machine...
[]' s
1. High explosives.
2. Rocket into the sun.
3. Dissolve in acid bath.
4. Laser beam (preferabley on shark's head)
5. Poison gas.
Oh, wait... those last two were from my "Evil villain list of how to get rid of nosy spies". Oh, well... same thing.
That is all.
If you're throwing them out anyway, send them to an NAID-certified destruction firm that also recycles the resulting hazardous materials.
Drive will eventually corrupt itself.
Remove platters, use shotgun on platters.
My method of choice is get the biggest axe or pick you can find and just give the drive a few good whacks, that will destroy all platters in a minute or so. If you don't have an axe just take it apart, whack the platters with a hammer, grab the magnets, and throw out the rest.
DBan quick erase takes very little time and the data will *NOT* be recoverable. Anyone who thinks otherwise watches too much CSI.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'd also be inclined to question: how much do you really need to destroy this data?
Right, that's the real question - "is the data worth the cost of recovery?" Nobody will use a probe microscope to try to recover your porn collection. Keys to a popular CA, perhaps.
Then again, a whack with a hammer is incredibly cheap insurance.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I use an external dock for SATA drives or a USB to IDE adapter and plug it into a spare windows PC in the office. A quick format and then "cipher /W" does the trick.
Oh, I almost forgot the most important step.... I teach an intern how to do it so that I'm not wasting my own time.
But, for the truly paranoid, you have to bypass or trick the controller to also overwrite the remapped bad sectors. That's not trivial a task, or, more precisely, it depends heavily on the controller's firmware and drive model.
:)
ATA Secure Erase
You'll need a Torx 8,7,6 screwdriver but! You can disasemble it. Remove the platters, make a pretty wind chime and have an ashtray left over!
Simply unscrew the (controller?) chip off the hard drive, and dispose of both of them separately.
4 years ago, I started to remove the hard drive from decommisioned PC's. I carefully put it in storage, behind a lock for security reasons. Now I have over 500 old drives in storage, but they are basically obsolete and reliability is questionable. Eventually, they will be destroyed anyway because there is no good use for 10-40 Gb hard drives, and management could be upset at the wasted storage space. Charities refused to take them. Any idea to avoid this hard drive mass destruction?
Pick-axe, one stroke 2 hands, job done.
Put Windows on it.
Nobody wants your shit, anyway.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Remove the platters from the drive (so you can salvage the super-strong magnets for Science! projects), and then take a sledgehammer to the platters. Breaking them into several pieces should keep anyone short of an intelligence agency away from your data, and even if an intelligence agency is actually after you, this will make their lives very miserable while they recover the data.
If you absolutely positively must destroy the data beyond all hope of repair, then melt the platter pieces down, use your sledgehammer to break up the resulting lump of metal again, and bury the pieces separately (in blocks of concrete if you can manage it). This is overkill, but it'll work.
Of course, then you have to deal with the problem of people deciding that your hard drives aren't worth recovering and going after your data other ways. Witness http://xkcd.com/538/ for an example.
Given that they used to use iron oxide coatings, a torch would do; you don't need to melt them, just hit the Curie point.
And a sledge is *so* satisfying.
On the other hand, at work, we had some old SCSI drives that were, quote, too big to fit in the frame of the Center's deGausser, so we disassembled the drives. Torx, I think the itty bitty screws were....
mark
8 seconds in a microwave is the best way to destroy a CD or a DVD. I am curious if anybody has tried microwaving a hard drive?
But I agree with other posters that physical destruction of the drive is stupid and pointless. Just zero the drive, and go on with your life.
Yeah, but you must obviously be in on the conspiracy: DBAN takes so long because it is uploading all the contents of your drive to the internet as it erases.
Even if you unplug it from the interweb it will still pulse the signals out over the PC's magnetic speaker to local WiFi devices for re-transmission.
The only way to truly hide your porn forever: put the drives in a bucket and fill with cement. Then drive out into the woods (late at night with lots of cloud cover so the Aliens and spy satellites can't see you) also make sure the woods are public park lands so that they aren't dug up any time soon. Dig about 8-10 feet down and BURY the porn in a deep deep grave. place lots of heavy rocks in the hole to make it harder to dig up. Its the only way to be sure...short of nuking the surface of the planet from space (but that would tend to take out your home, neighbors etc, so is not advisable)
I deal with this stuff at work every day, and the way it's ACTUALLY done isn't as fancy or as fun as people seem to think. We use a high-ish speed hydraulic press to deform the platters to the point where they're not able to spin/turn/anything any more. that step is basically securing the drives for transport to an industrial shredding facility. They dump the drives into a giant shredder that spits chunky dust out the other side.
Assuming you've got the "normal" selection of tools in your place, just disassemble the drives and use a coarse grit sandpaper on the magnetic surfaces. About 60 seconds of elbow grease on each side should be enough. If extra paranoid, rinse the platters, and if you can still see yourself, do it again. A clamp and power sander would be a neat extra.
As many posters have said, save the actuator magnets. The older the drive, the bigger the magnet. They are more powerful than anything you'll find at a hardware store, enough to draw blood if a couple pinch a fingertip. Neodymium iron boron magnets are brittle, so I'd suggest leaving them on their steel backplates (see here for details).
Luke, help me take this mask off
Hahah.. I've got an old Microwave Oven in the basement used for tasks like this.
But a Saturday morning at the gun range with a nice .50 cal sniper rifle is a really fun way to destroy old hard drives.
I don't get it either.
If someone has data that is that important then the disk should have been fully encrypted in first place with strong encryption. Wiping isn't even necessary unless leaking data has importance affecting national security or the like. Otherwise it's just a excercise in futilty.
I came in here to say the same thing. I made my own propane kiln for a few hundred bucks. It runs off propane and quickly gets sheet metal up into the orange/yellow. My thermocouple has told me temps in the 1800-1900F range. That'll fix up your hard drive quick. Disclaimer: Probably would put off all kinds of toxic fumes if you try, so I can't recommend trying this. If you do though please go outside in the open and never in an enclosed space.
Another good idea might be to leave the drive in a solution of muriatic acid for a couple of days. I know some smiths use a muriatic acid (think swimming pool supply store) solution to de-rust parts before work. If it strips rust off, that would peel the platters clean of information since the information is stored in a layer of iron oxide.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Sorted. Next question?
300,000 hrs = 34.2 years! You might want to double check the specs. I'm betting the 300,000 hrs is MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), which is not directly related to MTTF. MTBF = (total # failures)/(total # hrs). FYI,
The figure of 300,000 hours appears to be based on running 100 disks for one year and counting 3 failures, instead of trying to run ten disks for 100 years and noting they generally fail in year 34. And that is the reason I don't believe published specs can properly reflect the real lifetime of a single hard disk.
The difference between Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) describes the methodology of the study, and says more about the type of product than the measurement. MTTF is measured when the clock is stopped when a unit fails. MTBF is measured for a fixed duration, with failed units repaired. Expensive items that are easy to repair are better measured in MTBF; while cheap, disposable, hard-to-repair items are better measured in MTTF. Hard drives typically fall under the latter category, as they're viewed as one of the repair components for a more expensive item (the computer system) which is probably measured in MTBF.
Because of the limitations of the testing methodology, neither MTTF nor MTBF provides a meaningful number for a single unit. The problem is that they express reliability in terms of a line based on just a few early data points, but we all know that the real hard disk lifetime plots out as the infamous Bathtub Curve. Think about it in terms of explaining these concepts to a manager who is about to sign a contract for 10,000 drives. He just wants to know if he can expect ten failures every month or one failure every year. It's a simplification because most people don't want to incorporate the bathtub curve into a contract, and because the vendors have to get the drives out on the market long before they can complete an actual test for the drive lifetime.
John
Not sure its legal but i have put a drive on the back stop and put plenty of 45 ACP and 5.56 through them. Usually you end up with lots of pieces but its a fun way to destroy a hard drive.
Though .223 works too.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/14/meet-bustadrive-a-home-made-hard-disk-destroyer/
oh - you beat me to it.
Drill Press! That's what I use for metal platters. I use a 3/8 inch bit and then drill a dozen+ holes through the case (I put a nail through the first hole so that the platters don't move). Use the spiral pattern seen on disk brakes of high end race cars. If I feel really ambitious I pry the case apart and using channel locks, bend the platter into a U. I also tear out the heads. For sensitive stuff - I also take the platters apart and distribute them across town in multiple trash bins (use a 1/2 inch bit and drill down through the center axle).
I've also found that ceramic platters shatter into a million pieces when the force of a 10lb sledge is applied.
And wear goggles!!! One time I didn't realize I was drilling into a ceramic disk and got glass in one eye when it shattered. And shatter isn't quite right - more like "mild explosion" into little slivers of glass.
Since Giant MR it's been very hard to read overwritten blocks without probe microscopy ($$$) ...
Cost (money, manhours, etc.) are often cited when it comes to why the NSA's requirements are silly, but people forget that the NSA is not working in the same problem space most are. The NSA and it's foreign counterparts *do* have the resources to spend on that kind of thing. They may even have technologies not publicly known. But they're also protecting things like nuclear launch codes. Chances are, your corporate payroll isn't capable of ending civilization as we know it. :)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It doesn't work. At least unless you sit there moving your mouse around.
I was several years ago what I tried it, so things may have changed.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Any drive in use more than six months is past the point of being a reliable piece of "perfectly good hardware". Storage devices are just too delicate and unreliable to reuse for any serious purpose after they have already been in production roles for any substantial length of time.
Take them apart and sand the platters with some sandpaper. There's all kinds of cool little metal bits inside and really strong magnets, it's fun to disassemble.
I like to take mine on an outing to the local shooting range. It's quite therapeutic.
If you're worried the NSA is investigating you then you may have justification for taking extreme measures, but if you're just a normal person looking to get rid of old drives I think a hammer or even a screwdriver will do just fine. When we have drives fail at work, I usually use a screwdriver to physically break off the SATA/IDE connector and poke some holes in any exposed circuit boards. This is sufficient to prevent dumpster divers from getting your data.
If you have access to tools, a drill press seems like a pretty easy way to render drives inoperable. I think that's what I'll do next time I have some drives to get rid of. Just make sure you use bits you don't care about as I would imagine going through a hdd will leave them a little worse for wear.
Wow, moderated down from 5 to 3! There must be a lot of "security experts" using slashdot now, what a shame. - So where shall the actually technically informed people go now, since the commoners are coming here?
At $WORK, I deal with medical data. Our number-one failure item is external hard drives...many fail due to bad power supplies...meaning that the drives won't spin up (in their current enclosure, with their current wall-wart), but they still have sensitive data. We cannot simply throw-away (or "recycle") this hardware, since some /.-reading miscreant would probably swap power supplies, enclosures, and PCBs in an innocent attempt to use the drive...and they they'd find patient-identifiable data.
Since the drives don't spin up, DBAN is not an option. [Obviously, the same principle holds whenever you're faced with drives that might have data, but for which you don't have the right interface, HBA, etc.]
It's not worth the time to dismantle each enclosure and then each drive, so I built a "Box-o-Entropy":
Construction: Picture a long, narrow, rectangular box, about 8~16" long, 6" wide and 5~8" high (advance apologies to the metric-superior portions of the world). The box is constructed of steel, and is reinforced on the long axis, and is open on one long side. Inside the box is a 3ton hydraulic jack, mounted on one short side. On the facing short side is a hollow square, about 4~5" on a side, made of steel tubing. The hydraulic jack is located so that when it is fully extended, the jack-screw is centered within the hollow square. The total construction cost was well under $50, and only wasted a few hours of my invaluable time.
Operation: A hard drive is placed in the box, against the hollow square. Pump the handle on the hydraulic jack a few times, until the hydraulic jack screw pushes the drive spindle out of the other side of the drive, cracking the platters and PCB in the process. It takes about 45 seconds to destroy a drive, doesn't require power tools, doesn't require flame, doesn't send pieces flying at high speed, and isn't noisy. The drive is visibly damaged, and clearly unusable.
sledgehammer
After reading up on the theory of data recovery, why would you even consider plain zeroing, as esoteric as the drive encoding might be?
Since PRML codes don't try to separate peaks in the same way that non-PRML RLL codes do, all we can do is to write a variety of random patterns because the processing inside the drive is too complex to second- guess.
A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected.
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data.
From your own link. Nowhere in there does it say one pass of an easily guessable pattern (all 0's, REALLY?) is sufficient. The very first pass listed is "Random". One pass of zeros is stupider than the full 7 or 35 pass overwrite...
That's not to say that you can recover data with the platters removed
What don't you people understand here?
From the link tossed around here a dozen times already..
"There are, from manufacturers sales figures, several thousand SPM's in use in the field today, some of which have special features for analysing disk drive platters, such as the vacuum chucks for standard disk drive platters along with specialised modes of operation for magnetic media analysis. These SPM's can be used with sophisticated programmable controllers and analysis software to allow automation of the data recovery process. If commercially-available SPM's are considered too expensive, it is possible to build a reasonably capable SPM for about US$1400, using a PC as a controller [6]."
Quit saying MAYBE, there are specialized tools being made for this task. They will continue to get better.
You are absolutely deluded if you guys think think your information is safe because it is hard to recover _today_ and think it will not be valuable the _day after_ you throw a drive out. Recovery techniques will get cheaper and more accessible over time, and your most sensitive information is sensitive for DECADES, maybe your whole life! Meanwhile, discarded drives are frozen in time, and you HOPE your data will be overwritten more than once by non-guessable data. Forget today's hard drives... twenty year old hard drives are cheap, not regarded as insecure, easy to recover data from, and still might have sensitive financial information. Why would't the same be true twenty years from now? They might have pocket scanning electron microscopes then!
Write random data, at least once, for your own good, twice if you have the time.
Disassemble all parts and send to different recycling trades. Maybe in the process you can get even some money back.
If you can't hit it and split it with the first attempt, then you really suck at splitting wood, and need much more practice. Single stroke, single HDD shattered and destroyed (or 16" round split in half). Of course, this is /. where 8 hours of heavy mouse use constitutes a long work out period...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Back up something relatively important, then walk around with the drive for say, 30 seconds. You'll drop it and the platters will shatter. On top of that, now you have a nice caxixi.
High Powered Rifle. Actually a 12 ga slug would be nice too. And... it's fun.
Hang the disks on fishing line. Best if you have several vintages of disks. Add some old table saw blades for a different tone.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Take them to your local pistol range and use them for target practice.
Have some fun with it. Take it apart and keep the magnets and spindles because you can make all sorts of crazy contraptions with it. Then burn the platters as heat destroys the magnetism and recycle the metal.
this is it. do i need to tell you where to put the hard drive?
My reloaded .270 Winchester ammo runs about 30 cents a shot...
3-5 shots per drive at 100 meters and not only do you have the platters shattered to bits, but it's good target practice...
A dozen drives would be a pleasant afternoon's plinking session...
Then dismantle the hard drives and melt the platters... But if your data is so important for the NSA, I guess that, even without the hard drives, they will be able to get the data from you... You'll be warned :)
Illegal porn? Things that should never see the light of day again, you need to make sure it's gone. Take the time and use the Linux Shred command, 2 passes, third pass zeros. This will do a very good job at keeping the data safe. Military grade is 7 times, however I think that is way overkill. I know they can get it up to 3 writes ago. It's very expensive but they can do it. If it's just crap, you may want to just destroy the interface board or remove it. Without an interface board, that makes it very difficult to get at the data. They know that even if they get the board, it may be a wiped disk. If your life depends on the data not being exposed, take the time and do it right. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean porn or government secrets. Sensitive data could be your financial records, tax returns, things like that. If a thief has your tax return, he can do you a lot of harm. Don't worry about them caring, they really don't care about you or what you go through either. IMHO they should be executed by hanging as soon as they are sure they are the ones doing the id theft.
By the way, I'm in the same boat. I have a bunch of old drives to get rid of. Same problem. For the drives I can't write to anymore because I have nothing to interface to it, I'm taking them apart and drilling the disks. Get a nice cobolt (Not cobolt brand, a cobolt drill) drill at Lowes or Home Depot. They go through it like melted butter. Yes, I've done this a few times already.
Free Geek recycles computers and parts - have you thought about donating to them?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mHmtuBxPkA
Salvage the magnets recycling firms will begin to pay
real bucks for rare earth scrap.
With the magnets in hand you also have the disks
in hand. Run those salvaged motor and seek magnets
over the media -- then don goggles and smack the platters
with a hammer.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I run them through the microwave for about 30 seconds. Yes, its metal. Sit it on a ceramic plate, and crank it up...
Writing zeros is less interesting than writing some /dev/random and then write a gazillion files
random bits or pseudo bits. Gather a block of
bits from
with those bits in the files to fill up the disk.
Many companies have a physical search and destroy
policy because working drives would be send out to
salvage at uncle bobs and then sold on the market.
By sawing a drive in half the auditor that has no clearance
can record the serial number in the gone for good logs.
And warranty might be collected from some companies.
If the data has value the policy looks a lot like the roach motel.
By stopping any repair, reuse or misuse data cannot flow
out on a 'spare'.
Solid state drives add some complexity to all this....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
....snip... /dev/random ...snip...
(/dev/urandom is too slow and
It is not necessary to generate a stream of random bits
for the drive. A couple blocks of random bits written
over and over will do the trick. The number of blocks
can be large enough to optimize I/O say 1/3rd of
the system memory...
The major risk for some is junk that should have been removed.
Deleting files from a dumpster should begin with a rename of the
files with a name long enough to leave little clue what the file was.
Walk through some random bits with a hex dump tool to make file names and rename
based on that. Filling up a file system with random bits of junk filled files occasional
can minimize garbage that might be latent in 'free' disk blocks.
Overwriting a file does nothing predictable as new filesystems are happy to
use free blocks and just change the list of blocks. The old data can
hang about a long time in the list of free blocks. Longer on solid state disks.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I can't stand "people" who can't stand security people. (And no, I'm not in the business of getting paid to destroy data, or hardware, so my post is not out of self-interest. How did your post get a score 4 and insightful? There's no insight, just unqualified opinion. I guess someone thinks opinion is the same as insight. ~ SIGH ~) The trouble with the ignorance you spew is that it presumes that the state of the particles in magnetic media representing a single bit in physical reality are an exact one-to-one match for the abstraction of a "0" or "1" they represent - that they can exist in only one state or another. Are you really assuming that a digital bit recorded to a disc is actually represented by a single atom, or perhaps a single molecule, and that that particle has exactly two possible states, and no more? That whole idea is absurd. The zero a HDD head reads is not a result of every single particle in that region of the media being identical, it's the result of the majority being in a particular state. A single pass that writes a zero does not necessarily change ALL of them, and data mining techniques CAN recover data that has been "wiped," if wiped insufficiently, just like if you write something on paper with a pencil, and erase it. There are still graphite traces, abrasions from the eraser, as well as the indentation the pencil's tip made as it deposited the graphite in the first place. A simple full format (or DBAN overwrite or whatever) will protect the data from those without the knowledge or equipment to recover it, but not from someone who has it, and wants that data. Of course, how sensitive is this data, OPer? There is such a thing as overkill. Lastly, bro, no one gives a shit what you're sick of, and the drives were (presumably) purchased and are (most likely) the legal property of the person who posted, and are therefore his to destroy, no matter how wasteful, your uninformed opinions notwithstanding. So, why not just stick to what you know, which is clearly not this, okay? As for how to destroy, the funnest way is with a jackhammer. Failing that, try a cutoff saw, just make sure to use proper protective equipment. If you don't have any of these things, you could just overwrite them, or whatever... OP, you stated you don't want to wait. Where's the fire? Will the data escape and run away to hide on your mortal enemy's hard drive if it's not destroyed by midnight?
Sorry - but that is just wrong. Data is recoverable even after multiple DBAN (and others) passes. And DBAN takes ages on very large drives.
I worked on this very topic for Google (loads of disks in those data centres, and losing PII is BAD) back in 2007. After a lot of research we found that physical destruction is the only guaranteed solution. As long as the platters are no longer flat, and preferably shredded, even very high tech approaches - like Scanning Electron Microscopes can no longer recover data.
Degaussers DO NOT WORK: in more than 70% of drives degaussed, the data was untouched - even at very high field strengths.
The firing range - that's the only way to do it and have fun at the same time. A 50 round box of 9mm goes fro $15~$22. Might be a little expensive in the long run, but just think of all the fun you'll have.
I'd avoid the Barrett .50 cal though - about $10 per cartridge. Yes, one shot should take care of it, but not as much fun as turning a M5 loose on 'em.
You're right of course, unless your computer has a random number generator built in /dev/random will stall when it runs out of entropy, moving your mouse or typing on the keyboard provides entropy for /dev/random to use. However for this purpose /dev/urandom should be good enough, when there is entropy it will/should provide a truly random output like /dev/random and when it runs out of entropy if will fall back to pseudorandom number generation.
You can take them apart in a couple minutes with the right size torqz bit, and have yourself some really strong magnets and a bunch of LARGE flat washers. Those rare earth magnets will be worth money someday. Oh, and an aluminum case, good for....I dunno, I've built gadgets into a couple,parts tray, that's about it.
I recently used a 60 litre steel bin incinerator loaded with garden waste and doused in kerosene to dispose of some old drives. What I ended up with was a lump of slag and ash in the bottom of the incinerator after some 13 hours of smoulder - an incinerator with four foot flames is not doing its job. There should be a lot of heat and not much smoke. The old drives were completely unrecognisable.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.