Slashdot Mirror
When Your Data Absolutely, Positively has to be Destroyed (Video)
Here's a corporate motto for you: "Destroying data since 1959." Timothy ran into a company called Garner Products (which doesn't use that motto as far as we know), at a security conference. While most exhibitors were busily preserving or encrypting data one way or another, Garner was not only destroying data but delighting in it. And yes, they've really been doing this since 1959; they started out degaussing broadcast cartridges so broadcasters could re-use them without worrying about old cue tones creeping into new recordings. Now, you might ask, "Instead of spending $9,000 or more to render hard drives useless, couldn't you just use a $24 sledge hammer? And have the fun of destroying something physical as a free bonus?" Yes, you could. You'd get healthy exercise as well, and if you only wanted to destroy the data on the hard drives, so what? New drives are cheap these days. But some government agencies and financial institutions require degaussing before the physical destruction (and Garner has machines that do physical destruction, too -- which is how they deal with SSDs). Garner Products President Ron Stofan says in the interview that their destruction process is more certain than shooting a hard drive with a .45. But neither he nor Tim demonstrated a shooting vs. degaussing test for us, so we remain skeptical.
No, no, no. When it absolutely has to be destroyed, you use thermite.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
I find a bath in NaOH to be a very effective way to destroy media past any possible recovery. Specially if you are going to incinerate it afterwards.
NaOH is also very cheap, and available everywhere, making it a wonderful low budget solution to use in the less cosmopolitan parts of the world.
morcego
Just store your data using ReiserFS, kill the power and your data's dead too.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
What are you going to do with several hundred 40GB IDE drives?
World's crappiest RAID5?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Just hand it over to any teenager - they usually destroy most things that comes anywhere near them.
To guarantee swift and total destruction make sure to tell them to *please* be careful with it.
And that it is fragile and expensive.
You misspelled CSI. The guy just looked at the drive and yelled "Enhance!" and all the data was back.