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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?"
Drill Baby Drill
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Exothermic oxidation-reduction makes drives dead.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
The magnetic field patterns are on the surface of the platters. Sand the surface off(recommendation: do not breathe result.) and there is nothing to recover.
Unless you have pretty cool secrets, though, nearly anything that prevents them from Just Working when plugged in is probably enough.
The first post is of course always the best suggestion yet, no matter how bad it is.
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make install -not war
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...
... get over yourself. Your data is not that important. Nobody cares.
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)
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.
A blowtorch should do the same job and is a heck of a lot more practical....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually, there are a whole bunch of industries that have to destroy hard drives appropriately. Anything with names, address, DOB, SSN, CC#, etc... If an old drive that you let out of your custody is found, and even a small bit of data is recovered, that comes down on you like a ton of bricks. Well, a ton of lawsuits.
You are correct though, we have our procedures specifically outlined. There's no question, check with the boss. There should be a formal written policy on it somewhere. If not, you aren't handling sensitive information, and/or you aren't in compliance.
I wrote our book. It's only 107 pages. Of course, I am the IT boss.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You know what's funny? I have drives to destroy. 1,500 of them. There was sensitive data on them, so they have to be physically destroyed. If we were to go that route, it'd take ... well, it'd probably cost more in drill bits than it's worth. :)
We found a local place that'll run drives through their shredder. No piece bigger than 1/4". They get to keep the scrap metal, but we have to transport the drives. Easy enough. If you look around enough, you're bound to find someone with such a facility.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.