Ten Ways To Destroy a Hard Disk 289
Barence writes "Following his blog last week about the homemade hard disk destroyer, Bustadrive, Mike Jennings was deluged with comments from readers, both on the blog and here on Slashdot. Most seemed to like the product, but also offered up far more innovative and madcap methods of hard disk destruction, with a wide range of implements used — household and otherwise. In this follow-up post, he rounds up the best of an imaginative bunch of hard disk destruction methods."
Missing option (Score:5, Funny)
Install Vista on it?
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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The "laptop mode" issue was, however, a real one...
Linux isn't that great, and Ubuntu isn't that friendly. It just happens to be the only choice for many people, for various reasons.
How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Write zeros. Once. Problem solved. Then you can sell the disk.
Physical destruction is only necessary if the disk is already broken, and you can't erase it properly.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm surprised they only had a list of ten. There must be 50 ways to wipe your platters.
Just give it a whack, Jack.
Smash it with a van, Stan.
Shoot it to destroy, Roy.
Just listen to me.
Soak it till it rusts, Gus.
You don't need to discuss much.
Toss it in the sea, Lee
And get yourself free.
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fucking brilliant.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Informative)
You are almost right, but not entirely. Some drive firmware (as I understand it) will detect failing sectors of the disk and mark them as "bad." Your software won't even see them, as this is done at the firmware level. This means your data will still be there on the disk, even after a zero-write.
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A hard disk has inaccessible spare sectors, which will be logically swapped in if a sector fails. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Error_handling [wikipedia.org]
How do you guarantee that there isn't some important data lying around in the swapped out sector? It is not accessible via the hard drives external interface, but could be accessed by a raw reading of the disk.
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Not too sure about this one anymore. Back in the day certainly.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's true! As a forensic specialist, give me a disk that has been overwritten with zeros, and I can recover approximately 50% of the bits that were on the disk before it was wiped.
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Encrypt the drive first with whatever the strongest encryption available is and then write all zeroes to it?
Then even if you can recover 50% of the bits, you would not be able to do anything with them unless you can figure out how to crack the encryption.
Would that work?
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Okay, people, I give up. Can someone please explain why the guy I responded to was funny and what the joke is?
I thought that overwriting everything with zeroes or ones and zeroes was a standard way to "sanitize" a drive, and that these forensic specialists often find data recovery a trivial matter even after doing such a wipe.
I've reread the guy's post several times and am still not seeing what caused the funny bit to be set. (Blame insufficient sleep for this perhaps?)
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Actually, "back in the day", it was believed that zeroing was insufficient protection against data recovery. In fact, I remember hearing such rumors since at least the time I could comprehend data storage, as a kid in the 80s. I forget where I read (or watched) it, but someone researched what was really necessary, and if I recall correctly, couldn't find a single data recovery company who would guarantee results on a zeroed drive, and most wouldn't even try. Maybe someone with better googling skills than
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Funny)
Now who the hell is going to trust a post from an NPC. Damn DM is trying to fool us again.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Informative)
No he can not. There is not a single data recovery company in the whole wide world advertising this capability and there isn't a single lawsuit in which data from an overwritten disk has been used as evidence. Data recovery from overwritten hard disks is BULLSHIT.
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He has a less chance to recover any data than if it was shot with a shotgun, as suggested by the article. I'm unconvinced that data can be retrieved back after the drive has been written with zeroes ones, much less that there are much people on Slashdot who would ever work with a hard drive that will end up at the good forensic IT guy, but for them there are better erasing programs. Certainly better than a shotgun, which might leave huge parts of the plates intact, if you don't shoot it enough times.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Informative)
Who the hell modded this informative?
It's perpetuating a myth.
Even Guttman says that with modern hard disks it's impossible to retrieve data once overwritten.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html [auckland.ac.nz]
Also:
http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/ [wordpress.com]
--
BMO
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Thanks for posting this. I posted one of these links last time something like this came up on Slashdot, and I was too lazy to find them again.
It's just silly to believe that a device with such a wide margin of error on "normal" data leaves any room for recovery on a wiped drive.
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How can it be less than 50% chance of recovering a bit? If I saw that in my results, I'd just add an "invert" step in the process and bam! 64% chance of recovery!
Ok, actually, i'd check my assumptions, but the first thing I'd do if I needed a paper published in a hurry is the invert thing.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the chances of two consecutive coin flips landing on the same side are EXACTLY 50%.
You statistics people think you're so smart.
But you have failed to account for the cases:
where the coin lands on edge.
where the coin rolls, and is lost under the refrigerator.
where a raven swoops down out of the sky and snags the coin midair and flies away with it.
where a man jumps out of the closet, grabs the coin, and runs away.
where when the coin hits, it breaks into two pieces, the microfilm flies out, and the pieces come to rest hollow side up.
where Annie Oakley shoots from the next room and blasts the coin to smithereens.
the Creationist case, where God, being extremely bored, miraculously causes the coin to turn into a glass of Guiness, which smashes to the ground and gets beer everywhere.
And probably other cases.
Where's your 50% now, eh?
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where a raven swoops down out of the sky and snags the coin midair and flies away with it.
I hate it when that happens. Scurrilous wee flappy raven bastards.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, really. You should have one of those good forensic guys go here [hostjury.com] and accept the challenge on that page; it would be pretty financially lucrative, if what you say is true. But it isn't true; such a recovery is impossible until proven otherwise.
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Where are your fucking shift and period keys?
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation?
I don't think there is a single legitimate source that has proved this is possible.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:4, Funny)
Absolutely true.... there is an easy way to avoid that problem in two simple steps. Either one will work:
1. Don't do anything that will raise the ire of someone with access to an appropriate microsocope.
2. If you can't do one, then stop using hard drives from the 1980s. Dude, where do you even find disk controllers for them that work in modern machines?
-Steve
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe YOU can, with your handy electron microscope, but mine is still on layaway.
Also, suppose you were trying to recover a specific file from my disk, and you had to use an electron microscope to recover every single bit. There are 1,889,785,610,240 bits on my 220gb hard disk. Assuming one-tenth of a second per bit to scan, you'd still spend about 6,000 years reading the drive to collect all the data. Trust me: the value of that data will have long expired by then.
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you'd still spend about 6,000 years reading the drive to collect all the data. Trust me: the value of that data will have long expired by then.
Not if it's porn!
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:5, Informative)
That and he's assuming that the harddrive actually writes out ones and zeroes. That's not how it works.
The harddrive stores information on the disk as a constant magnetic field, the only "information" on the disk is the polarity of the magnetic field. So a "bit" on disk is positive, or it is negative.
The harddrive stores information using flux reversal. A 1 is a flux reversal, a 0 is no change. So 1001110 is stored as +---+-++. Switching polarity is considered a 1, not switching is a 0. 1001110 could also be represented as -+++-+--, it all depends on the current polarity when the data is written. The harddrive uses RLL encoding, so 1001110 is actually written out as 01000010000100.
Also, you have to read the entire sector, since the data is xored together before it is RLL encoded. A single byte in a sector is garbage unless you xor it with all the bytes after it in the sector.
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They don't take chances. They don't research. They just do what it takes to be SURE. That doesn't mean that they aren't overly paranoid.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The D.O.D and NSA are forward thinking because many of their secrets can be potentially damaging well into the future. They aren't just looking at making them not readable today, but hopefully not readable 25 or more years into the future when new technology may be availible to obsolete the current limitations to our technology.
Making several passes attempts to increase the likelihood of that not being possible.
Re:How about: Write zeros to the disk? (Score:4, Informative)
Government protocol for destruction of a drive that has ever held secret data is to shred the drive until the pieces pass through a 1 mm sieve. No amount of "passes" will erase data on sectors that the drive firmware has marked "bad". 1 pass with random data is adequate to prevent recovery (on a GMR drive, and probably on any post-MFM drive), but only for those sectors the HHD firmware is still willing to write to.
In practice, the government often just sells the computer without taking any steps to delete the data. But hey, that's government for you.
Spot Welder? (Score:5, Interesting)
The average welding torch, meanwhile, is a fully paid-up member of the "life-threatening but enormously enjoyable" club - and there's no denying that a 3,000-degree flame would reduce the average hard disk platter to a pool of reflective liquid quicker than you could say "data protection". It's a superb suggestion from Steve, who also put forward the angle grinder for consideration. We're worried about him.
A not as messy method might be a spot welder [wikipedia.org]. They go by different names but my dad's shop used to have a nice adjustable Miller spot welder that would function great for sheet metal work. Anyway, I can envision a homemade spot welder [youtube.com] (very trivial to make) with a stand around it and two wooden 2' by 2' pieces of plywood with a handle grip sticking up and two hard drive holes counter sunk with a quarter inch lip to hold each drive (for 3.5" and 2.5" drives). Place the hard drive in the selected hole and clamp your spot welder on it and go to town. Mark your initials in it and you should have a pretty solid drive with no mess, no metal shreds laying around, no flying debris or sparks and probably easier to store/recycle/transport. Man, I wish I didn't live in the city and had a wood and metal machine shop.
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Don't do this with a ceramic drive...
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You only need one (Score:2, Funny)
Magnesium (Score:5, Informative)
Strip the grayshit (magnesium normally, if its something else it probably wont work as well through the case) and crush it into a powder off of all sparklers but 1, you can strip the last one down to about an inch or so from the tip. Pile it all on the harddisk/shell, light the sparkler tip that's left, insert into the pile, and other than it appearing as though the sun is arm's length in front of you for 5-10 seconds, anything underneath shall be melted/vaporized due to the white hot heat released. I've melted through steel grills at my local beach at night this way before, around 11pm 1 package of sparklers prepared this way lit up the local beach on long island sound for about a mile in all directions as if it was daytime.
Re:Magnesium (Score:5, Funny)
And when you win a Darwin award, here I'll be able to say, "I knew him when..."
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(only fire-related Darwin Award I could find in my brief search)
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Sparklers have more in them than magnesium. That's how you're able to be lit by a simple lighter or match and why they sparkle. I believe gunpowder is a minor ingredient, but I've no idea what else. While such a mess would not explode, it would burn very, very quickly and shoot off sparks in a myriad of directions.
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I've melted through steel grills at my local beach at night this way before, around 11pm
May I be the first to ask....why??
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Well, the last thing I remember is, me and Billy Joe and Frankie and my brother George were in the Dew Drop Inn having a few beers, and Billy Joe says 'hey everyone, let's go huntin'!', and I said "I'm game."
Thank you very much, I'll be here all week...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duh: use a WIll It Blend blender. (Score:4, Funny)
And after you shred the disk with the blender, don't forget to try to return it to get your money back [willitblend.com].
the best way to render a hard drive useless (Score:5, Insightful)
install Windows ME
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
The most fun... (Score:2)
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Trying to destruct a drive while the plates are spinning and the disk is open can be dangerous. I've done it a few times, but recently there are some manufacturers that make the plates from glass, and the glass can easily be crused if you do something to the plates while they're spinning, or you spin them too fast. I knew a kid who had been injured by hitting a glass plate of a hard drive while it was spinning.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Nuke it from orbit! (Score:4, Funny)
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Hey, I think I saw this guy at a healthcare townhall meeting!
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The camera you require isn't going to be electronic. Also, and this is often neglected for some reason, you're going to need some *powerful* lighting in addition to the camera.
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Shooting with a .223 can have other interesting effects as well (at least that's the one I noticed this on). I used a hypervelocity varmint load, light bullet, real fast, like 3800 fps, in a good rifle that can take that kind of overload. This was a plastic tip thing designed to more or less explode on contact -- even a piece of cardboard will make it go fragmented.
In shooting a floppy drive, one that really deserved it, I managed to hit the magnet for the drive motor, and powder it. The sudden disappear
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I love people with no sense of humor.
Around our office, I maintain the "Visitor's Doc", a two-page list of places to eat and things to do for people who are assigned to our office for a week or two. We have a constant stream of these folks from all over the country. Their stays are usually short and they appreciate a guide that tells them where to get lunch.
For the ones staying over the weekend, there's a section on things to do that includes the following:
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Basically your post is a poor attempt to wave you penis around.
Basically your post is a extremely effective attempt at demonstrating that you have absolutely no sense of humor ;)
Perhaps both
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Basically your posts suck. Just give it up already.
Leverage the spinning platters to your advantage (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Even if destroying the drive wasn't intentional. Sigh.
Use silica sand in a capsule (Score:2)
A similar concept to yours, pressing a silicone button on the drive breaks open a sealed capsule of silica sand into the HDA; this would most certainly scrub any magnetic film from the rotating disks. And during its self destruction, it would attempt to rezero and seek, sure to polish most every data surface and thoroughly destroying the heads .
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Hmm, i don't think it will work so well on modern drives but we had an old hard disk from our mini computer turn itself into a metal lathe one night. Came in the next day to find a whole room full of aluminum shavings. Shredded several of the 11" platters into nothingness. After the pieces went through the fan nothing was more than 1/8 x 1". At least everyone understood the value of the offline backup.....
Very effective data destruction however it was a tad messy after it blew about a million aluminum curly
Death by locomotive (Score:2)
I have a friend whose brother is a locomotive engineer, so whenever I have a bunch of drives to destroy, we head for the railroad yard when the brother works the night shift (no bosses at that time), and we merrily lay down the drives on the track, and the brother brings along his engine we watch the crunch crunch crunch crunch action. His brother can enjoy the action too, as the engines are remote controlled (like toy cars)...
Easiest Destruction Method (Score:5, Funny)
I swear jean designers are in cahoots with cell phone manufacturers. Just slip your hard drive into the back pocket of a girl in a night club wearing tight jeans
The Actual List ... (Score:5, Informative)
2 - "What's wrong with an angle grinder?"
3 - The average welding torch
4 - weaponry, from 12-gauge shotguns to high velocity rifles
5 - Science fans will be pleased to see an electromagnet on the list
6 - use a drill
7 - Hard disk platters are generally made from aluminium, which melts at 660.32C
8 - Electric log splitters
9 - An industrial shredder
10 - Finally, another method that scores valuable points for science: Thermite
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10 seems redundant with 7 (thermite burns at up to 2500C, according to Wikipedia), and I'm not sure why 5 and 10 get science points while 7 doesn't.
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Yeah, and all of the methods the GP posted are needlessly messy, dangerous, and destructive. Try this instead: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml [ucsd.edu]
Secure Erase uses ATA commands to tell the drive erase itself using the drive's own built in methods. Using the Secure Erase ATA command will erase parts of the drive that are normally missed by reformatting using the OS, and takes on the order of 20 minutes. Data on an ATA hard drive can be missed by the OS, ATA drives reallocate sectors due t
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How is thermite not number one? The quantity of thermite required to destroy a hard drive will easily fit in a 3.5" drive bay (above the drive in question), and can be made from materials purchased exclusively at Toys 'R' Us, including the ignition device. The only downside is that you have to build your case out of refractory bricks, so no over-clocking.
Thermite (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCWLpRc1yM [youtube.com]
Fastest way (Score:4, Funny)
I like the CIA/NSA method the most (Score:3, Funny)
... which is to grind the device into dust, carried out entirely under supervision with all employees holding top secret clearances. I don't know where the dust then goes, but I doubt it's out of the country.
Become a plumber (Score:5, Interesting)
When going through higher education I was originally aiming for a career in IT but half way through decided I didn't really fancy sitting at a desk all day. Becoming a plumber has definitely been the best decision I ever made, I get to work with really cool tools every day, plus I'm at the top of my profession having started plumbing about 6 years ago. I'm one of only 3 people qualified at my level in Mid Wales, and so am in incredible demand. I mainly work on servicing/maintenance on commercial/industrial heating and ventilation systems and see some incredibly cool tech every day. Sorry to brag, but as a self confessed geek, I have to say, plumbing is freaking awesome!
Kinda off topic, sorry about that. I don't often have any connection with anything posted on /. but like to read about it anyway.
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You are also in a trade that will be in demand longer than you will live, can not be outsourced, whose services all modern humans require, and whose required skill set makes you a versatile fellow.
"I mainly work on servicing/maintenance on commercial/industrial heating and ventilation systems and see some incredibly cool tech every day."
Mmm. No shit piping! What's not to like? :)
How to ensure all data is lost (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite way to ensure all data is lost on an hard disk is to store the only copy of my Master's thesis on that drive.
Seems to me... (Score:2)
It seems to me you really only need one: Mossberg.
And lo it did come to pass that the frustrated IT geek spaketh "Go ahead, make my day", as they prepared to dispense final judgment upon the failing storage device. And there was a joyous noise and the bits and pieces were taken up unto the Lord in his mercy. Amen.
Thus ends the reading from the book of Jobs.
Fun (Score:2)
Circular reasoning (Score:2)
So a blog post gets a /. mention. Then the blogger summarizes the /. comments into a top-ten list (and a quick perusal suggests it's just a copy-and-paste job of the +5 comments, no new information added) and submits this summary as another /. story and gets those recycled comments accepted?
A rather cheap way to drive up page hits, IMO.
Sometimes the hammer has drawbacks (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the first drive I opened was an old IBM DeskStar. I had forgotten what DeskStar drive platters were made of...
One swing and I had to call a halt to the whole operation while I swept a metric buttload of treacherous fragments of shattered glass up off my kitchen floor.
I conducted the rest of the destruction outside, near the Dumpster.
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Deskstar platters are made from glass? How is that possible? That's actually one of the few drive types I've not done any percussive adjustment to.
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More industrial shredder video (Score:2)
Destroying a hard drive? (Score:2)
Apparently, asking the Best Buy staff to install a new video card will work pretty well.
Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, rather than find a way to reuse a complicated piece of tech, lets play like cavemen and come up with awesome ways to break it so no one can do anything with it.
Sure, some data is too valuable to risk, but it is 2009, you would think we would have a non-physically destructive way to securely erase data rather than a hammer.
The scope of the pure wastefulness of this is just sick. Yeah, I'm probably in a minority, but this logic is why our landfills leach out heavy metals into the water table.
America used to be resourceful and frugal.
Burn it up in the atmosphere (Score:2, Interesting)
Oddly enough... (Score:2)
I just destroyed two drives yesterday.
After throwing them 20 feet in the air (repeatedly) and watching them bounce, I realized that the platters still hadn't shattered - darn, they must be aluminum. (Deskstars are easy to destroy like this. They make pretty sounds with all the tinkling platterparts inside - like a rainstick.)
So I took them into the tool shop, cut about halfway through them with a chop saw (glorified angle grinder), then clamped them into the vise, and struck them with a hammer.
The result
A freind of mine once.... (Score:3, Funny)
Might make a good Mythbusters segment (Score:2)
They could enlist the help of a data recovery company to test the feasibility of recovering data from the drives in question.
Could include SSDs for good measure.
Now obviously they'd try out violence (hammer, grinders), thermite, various weapons and explosives, but it'd be interesting to see their take on it, even if the 'simple' ways (like wiping and electro magnets) hardly make for good TV (let alone fast with wiping).
Even a "here's the quickest way to erase everything securely" bit would be fun.
I mean - i
simple way (Score:3, Insightful)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
My method of HDD disposal (Score:3, Informative)
2. Dismantle drive, remove platters and magnets
3. Use magnets for interesting things
4. Either: Use platters for interesting things, or: Destroy platters (bending them up works well)
Cost: essentially nothing.
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Yes, turning hard drives into clocks can be fun... :-)
http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/ [ian.org]
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Dirty Hippie!