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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
Drill Baby Drill
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
* 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?"
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.
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!
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
1/4" bit, drill 3 or 4 holes through the drive around the platter. Cost: zero. Time: about 1 minute per drive.
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
...similar to 'Punkin Chunkin'.
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, I didn't see him specify 20 gig hard disks, where did he state that?
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...
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.
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
They definitely wouldn't be able to get the data back if you'd formatted them with 2's and 3's.
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.
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...
Depends on how bad "your worst" is.
Fire away until destroyed. Gets the job done and it's fun.
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.
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.
You crushed them with a drill press? Here's a tip: the switch on the drill press makes the pointed thing spin, and you can turn the handle to make the pointed thing put holes in the hard drives. It's much less work than crushing them.
John
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.
A drill press does not crush things unless you're using it wrong. A drill press makes holes in things. It sounds like you stuck the drive in a press, not a drill press. Hydraulic presses can put TONS of force on things, one year at the annual Dayton Hamfest, my buddy brought a 60-TON hydraulic press (about the size of a car jack) and we went around buying $2.00 old cell phones and crushing the shit out of them! A really flat cell phone looks hilarious, and makes a nice coaster. Of course, all the jokes were "gee that phone has flat audio", "can I get a flat rate plan?", etc.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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 :-)
They successfully destroyed the drives it was stored on?
^ 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.)
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.
... get over yourself. Your data is not that important. Nobody cares.
"freezing process will physically destroy the platters, rendering the disc completely useless."
Not a chance, as anyone who's ever left their notebook in a car overnight in the winter will tell you - it still works just fine the next day.
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
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
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.
As many are glass, just remove the screws, open and hit with a hammer. Don't forget your safety glasses!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
freezing a drive won't nessarly destroy the platter. You can sometimes recover data from a head crash by freezing the drive and then spinning it up because the head arm has shrunk from the cold pulling the head off the drive. also a data recovery company could recover a from just the platter even if the electronics in the drive are broken.
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... --
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.
Dynamite is just as fun!
Concentrated Nitric Acid will also take care of a lot of stuff in interesting ways. Just don't breathe the fumes.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Drill + Thermite. Lots of smoke but no more hard drive.
It's not a matter of whether or not it's recoverable. It's all about making it unfeasible to recover the data - by mechanical means or financially. Then again, the original poster of this article sounds like a regular everyday jackoff that is a bit paranoid about his own decade-old information. Just removing the platters would be sufficient in that case. Turn them into a piece of artwork or something.
The game.
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".
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"
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.
Those drives weren't written with zeros-- only physically damaged =) Also it looked like each platter was relatively intact.
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.
I'm kinda curious to see what would happen if you pulled out the platters and put them in a microwave oven.
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.
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/
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.
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!
If the recovery company spins the heads slowly over a stationary platter, that isn't viable.
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.
The above is the easiest way to do it.
Just open it up with a torx wrench, and sand the platters by hand with some 60 grit paper until they're not shiny. The magnetic dipoles only goes a few tens of nanometers deep on the surface of the platter.
More data, damnit!
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.
!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Magnets? Incantations? Sand?
Dude. You know what a splitting maul is? It's a combination sledge/axe that splits logs.
1) Place drive on log
2) Apply high velocity force vectored through the head of said splitting maul in a 180 degree path.
3) Pick up halves and repeat step 2 if desired.
4) Drop quarters off the end of the dock into LI Sound.
Why get all complicated?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
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
Just removing the platters would be sufficient in that case.
Even that's overkill. All he needs to do is toss them in the trash.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that they'll be found afterward -- and even less likely that anyone would who did find them would do more than giggle at his collection of Japanese tentacle porn for a few minutes before formatting the drive.
Of course, this submitter is clearly insane so the drives are likely already formatted. In that case, his precious secrets (like that evite from his mom about his grandmothers 80th birthday party) would still be perfectly safe. Honestly, who's going to spend the time/money to recover data from a drive they found in some residential trash?
Required reading for internet skeptics
After filling it with water it's a different story. Although OP is wrong about the electronics. Water, in general, won't do much to powered-off electronics as long as they are sufficiently dried before being turned back on.
... It's the only way to be sure...
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.
If you zero out a drive, no-one can ever recover the data. It's gone, forever. No trace of it is left.
No, the NSA doesn't have some big magic machine that can miraculously recover the data from the edges of the tracks, or whatever. It's gone.
Any hard disk drive made in the past 15 years no longer uses MFM, but something more like QAM to record data on the disk. Thus, the bits are stored as many different levels and phases. The idea of being able to guess what a bit was by the remaining magnetic field works for stuff that we used in the 1980s, nothing newer.
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.
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!
It depends who you're trying to hide your data from. When I bin a hard drive, I'm only worried about two-bit scam artists going through my trash and finding some meet for identity theft, maybe manage to skim a credit card number, They'll be more than thwarted by bashing the thing with a hammer a couple of times until the plates rattle and the connector is mashed out of shape.
It might not protect me from the full might of the world's intelligence services- but they're not exactly a main concern of mine.
Ya, it was here
His prize wasn't worth the time of any data recovery company. Anyone can put a challenge like that up. It doesn't mean anyone will take it seriously. The only thing it proved was that data recovery companies aren't idiots. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.)
The point is that the platters get bent.
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... :-)
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.
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?
[;)]
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.
A hammer?
Immigration to Canada
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.
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
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?)
Fire, exactly!
Just put them in an oven that can do more than 250C, and possibly reach 500C, the typical stability temperature of cobalt alloys, the material that usually make the ferromagnetic surface of hard disk platters. Bonus points if you can do 650C, then you will start melting the aluminum and approach the Curie temperature of cobalt alloys. There is physically no way to recover anything once you do that.
Btw I don't know about microwaves, but that may be a nice (and fun) option too. Of course you'd need to dismantle the shielding first, but as someone has mentioned, that wouldn't take more than 10 minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
use a drill. The bigger the better. More often.
Fire Bad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5GKInPlOsg
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
.
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
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.
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...
A ten pound sledge, some serious anger issues and a free afternoon should do the trick.
... 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
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.
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.
Go get yourself an acetylene torch set and start cutting away.
End Transmission....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Nuke the entire hard drive from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure.
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.
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.
In that case the OP needs to add an important step: "punch a hole in the drive." I wouldn't count on enough water getting in through the pressure value on a hard drive. I don't think I'd count on ice erasing the platters either.
Agreed about the electronics. Especially in a hard drive. The electronics are a simple board with no enclosed parts to keep water sitting around, so it should dry quite quickly.
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.
clay pot
thermite
torch
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.
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 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).
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."
Throw down a wood block, put HD on block, apply sledge. Two or three good strikes and you're set.
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.
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.
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.
Donate them to add to my wall. http://sacramento.craigslist.org/wan/2624342850.html I will pay shipping.
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.
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.
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?
Works well for CDs, just doesn't smell too good. Don't do this at work, people get pissed.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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!
Mark "FRAGILE" and ship via UPS.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Simply unscrew the (controller?) chip off the hard drive, and dispose of both of them separately.
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
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
It will if "your worst" = gouging them + bending them + blow torching them + disposing of each platter in separate locations (assuming multiple platters)
If there is someone/some-state willing to spend the money and time required to recover data from that then 1) they are welcome to it, 2) *I* have the money to spend to further erradicate the platters (read: melt them to slag or use a degauser).
If you can't be good, be good at it!
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 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
Though .223 works too.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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?
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?
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.
How did they do it?! Is there a way to ask slashdot this?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 use them as a glass pad
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
You can recover data from metal dust? A few seconds with a grinder on the disk faces should work quite well. Disassembly and physical destruction doesn't seem the easiest way, but it would work.
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.