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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.
Drill Baby Drill
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Exothermic oxidation-reduction makes drives dead.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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!
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
...delete all other copies.
They should magically become unreadable.
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.
You can buy muriatic acid in just about any hardware store. It's basically hydrochloric acid.
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 always take them apart for the free magnets inside.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Basically, or is that acidically...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
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...
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
It's the only way to be sure
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
Actually, there are a whole bunch of industries that have to destroy hard drives appropriately. Anything with names, address, DOB, SSN, CC#, etc... If an old drive that you let out of your custody is found, and even a small bit of data is recovered, that comes down on you like a ton of bricks. Well, a ton of lawsuits.
You are correct though, we have our procedures specifically outlined. There's no question, check with the boss. There should be a formal written policy on it somewhere. If not, you aren't handling sensitive information, and/or you aren't in compliance.
I wrote our book. It's only 107 pages. Of course, I am the IT boss.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You know what's funny? I have drives to destroy. 1,500 of them. There was sensitive data on them, so they have to be physically destroyed. If we were to go that route, it'd take ... well, it'd probably cost more in drill bits than it's worth. :)
We found a local place that'll run drives through their shredder. No piece bigger than 1/4". They get to keep the scrap metal, but we have to transport the drives. Easy enough. If you look around enough, you're bound to find someone with such a facility.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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!
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
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.
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)
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.
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