Trashing Hard Drive .. Good enough??

[Clarence Martin]

Pulled the Hard Drive out of the old Computer , and drilled 4 holes into the Hard Drive. One each at top , bottom and left and right sides. Dang, that Hard Drive was tough to drill into, even with a new sharp drill bit !!

Is that Hard Drive trashed enough to throw out ?

[Al Launier]

I would certainly think so, but you could also swioe it with a magnet.

[Robert Delhommer Sr]

Or a sledge hammer.

[Roger Feeley]

My wife was an elementary principal and her teachers loved the magnets out of those things. They had metal studs in the school and the magnets were powerful enough to hold the kids artwork through the sheetrock.

When I trash a hard drive, I take it apart, save the magnets and hit the disks with sandpaper.

I don't know what the disk platters are made of but they sure are light. you might see if they are magnesium and light them up.

[Raymond Fries]

I usually break the circuit board on the back and smash all of the pins as well. Maybe overkill. I doubt anyone would send a smashed drive to a company like Gillware for data recovery on the off chance there is something there.

Just drilling holes is probably sufficient.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

The disks were originally made from aluminum coated with a magnetic material.

I'd drill a couple holes through the disk and you should be good to go.

[John K Jordan]

Pulled the Hard Drive out of the old Computer , and drilled 4 holes into the Hard Drive. One each at top , bottom and left and right sides. Dang, that Hard Drive was tough to drill into, even with a new sharp drill bit !! Is that Hard Drive trashed enough to throw out ?

How sensitive is the data? National security secret spy stuff? Old picture of the grandkids? There is software that will overwrite disks several times. Just erasing the files does nothing to the data. Even overwriting can leave residual ghosts of data a motivated tech geek can detect.

It is possible to retrieve much data even from disks with holes drilled in them. This takes a lot of work and must offer enough promise of a reward for someone to attempt it. With my drives I don't worry too much.

It is harder to read data if the disk surface is distorted (so it can't be spun) and if the disk surfaces are deeply scratched or otherwise physically damaged. Putting the disks in a very hot fire after hitting with the grinder and smashing with a sledge hammer should cover all bases. A map gas, oxy-acetyl torch, or plasma cutter can muck up the data. A strong magnet may not be enough. Personally, I find it fun to shoot disk drives with 9mm slugs. Makes for some interesting wall art.

I too save the magnets.

I have a collection of disks in my personal museum as well. One interesting disk is from the 70s, is about 18" in diameter and held 5mb of data. Another is about an inch in diameter. I also have paper data tapes, a variety of floppies, optical disks, and some very ancient core memory with tiny ferrite beads hand strung on a copper wire matrix. Good fun.

JKJ

[Ken Fitzgerald]

John....the first CT scanners I maintained used DEC RK-05 hard drives. 5 mb...removable platters. Used battery backup to retract the heads in the event of a power failure. We had to replace the batteries and align the heads annually.

[Keith Outten]

I salvage as many parts as I can from old hard drives. The magnets, aluminum spacers, motors and the drive discs. I probably have a hundred drive discs stored in a plastic CD container in my shop on the shelf.

If you want to destroy the data on the discs use a random orbital sander on both sides of the disc. It will remove the magnetic surface.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

If you want to destroy the data on the discs use a random orbital sander on both sides of the disc. It will remove the magnetic surface.

Great idea Keith!

[Mel Fulks]

If you want to destroy the data on the discs use a random orbital sander on both sides of the disc. It will remove the magnetic surface.[/QUOTE]


That's the sport called "Extreme Editing"!!

[Wade Lippman]

What do you guys keep on your disks!? I overwrite it, take the magnets out, and call it good. If someone spends a few hours recovering my data they will be really disappointed.

My first hard drive was 20mb, the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000 (which in 1980 was a lot of money). Maintenance cost $1,000 a month, and it crashed about twice a year.

[Peter Kelly]

A low-level format of the volume would be more than sufficient.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

What do you guys keep on your disks?

The only thing I worry about is some personal financial records and information. I don't even store passwords.

[Keith Outten]

Most of the discs I have stored were removed from server hard drives from my days as an Internet Service Provider. We did store customer financial information in those days so I decided that the most effective way to make sure the discs could never be read again was to remove the magnetic media.

I got real cautious in those days about protecting company information and customer data. I had a special trash can that I kept by my desk, any paper that had customer information, even if it was just their name and address, went into the spacial trash can and I took it home and burned it in my burn barrel. That same trash can is beside my desk in my shop office right now and I still burn that trash once a week.

[Stephen Tashiro]

While we're getting paranoid about hard drives, we should remember that many office machines (printers, fax machines) have hard drives in them. (It's amusing to think about drilling a printer full of holes or smashing it with a sledge hammer.)

[Curt Harms]

While we're getting paranoid about hard drives, we should remember that many office machines (printers, fax machines) have hard drives in them. (It's amusing to think about drilling a printer full of holes or smashing it with a sledge hammer.)


And those apparently can be a treasure trove - because people don't know/don't think about them. If a disk is fairly new or has low run time per S.M.A.R.T. data, there's DBAN (Darik's boot and nuke) or hdparm/ATA Secure Erase. Get an external Hard Drive enclosure and use the old drive for archival purposes.

[Lee Schierer]

Why not just take it apart and take out the two powerful magnets and then just use a pair of pliers to bend the disks.

[Garth Almgren]

Drilling should be good enough. If it were one of the older glass platters, that would shatter the platter rendering it completely unrecoverable, but it'll damage an aluminum platter as well and probably cause the head(s) to crash, causing even more damage.

Even just using an eraser program that overwrites the data with all 1s or 0s 2-3 times would be enough to render the data unreadable to anyone outside of the NSA or a large data recovery business. It would take some very specialized equipment to pull any (likely highly fragmented) data off a hard drive wiped like that.

Easiest way though is with a sledgehammer, after removing the magnets of course. :D

[Kev Williams]

I took apart one of my hard drives not long ago, a 40 gig Western Digital I think it was, not real old I guess, but it had glass platters.

I think the fastest, most efficient way for ME to drill holes in a hard drive would be via a few rounds from my .357 ;)

[Curt Harms]

This seems like a reasonable take on erasing and making unrecoverable data on hard drives. Note the difference between old and newer technologies.

http://blog.blancco.com/blog/how-many-overwriting-rounds-are-required-to-erase-a-hard-disk/

I figure the entities that have the sophisticated equipment necessary to recover data from a magnetic hard drive that has been overwritten 2-3 times can employ less technologically demanding methods to obtain the data they seek - things like subpoenas and search warrants.

[Brian Tymchak]

John....the first CT scanners I maintained used DEC RK-05 hard drives. 5 mb...removable platters. Used battery backup to retract the heads in the event of a power failure. We had to replace the batteries and align the heads annually.

Ah, the glory days.. :)

My arms ache just remembering the RP04 and RP06 disk packs we moved around when I worked at AT&T (mid 80s). I remember that when we changed packs to do it as quickly as possible, to minimize the down time for the bearings in the disk drive. They had a tendency to warp if they cooled down.

Oh the poor soul who dropped one of those packs on the hard floors. The noise was incredible and of course there was no let up for days with the hazing afterwards.

And when one of those drives crashed while in flight, the smell of the head scraping the media off the platter would permeate the hallway. Almost everyone had a platter with a big gouge hanging on their office wall. Kind of a badge of honor I guess...

...good times..