Why Millions of Usable Hard Drives Are Being Destroyed (bbc.com) 168
Millions of storage devices are being shredded each year, even though they could be reused. "You don't need an engineering degree to understand that's a bad thing," says Jonmichael Hands. From a report: He is the secretary and treasurer of the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI), a partnership of technology companies promoting the secure reuse of storage hardware. He also works at Chia Network, which provides a blockchain technology. Chia Network could easily reuse storage devices that large data centres have decided they no longer need. In 2021, the company approached IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) firms, who dispose of old technology for businesses that no longer need it. The answer came back: "Sorry, we have to shred old drives."
"What do you mean, you destroy them?" says Mr Hands, relating the story. "Just erase the data, and then sell them! They said the customers wouldn't let them do that. One ITAD provider said they were shredding five million drives for a single customer." Storage devices are typically sold with a five-year warranty, and large data centres retire them when the warranty expires. Drives that store less sensitive data are spared, but the CDI estimates that 90% of hard drives are destroyed when they are removed. The reason? "The cloud service providers we spoke to said security, but what they actually meant was risk management," says Mr Hands. "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero."
"What do you mean, you destroy them?" says Mr Hands, relating the story. "Just erase the data, and then sell them! They said the customers wouldn't let them do that. One ITAD provider said they were shredding five million drives for a single customer." Storage devices are typically sold with a five-year warranty, and large data centres retire them when the warranty expires. Drives that store less sensitive data are spared, but the CDI estimates that 90% of hard drives are destroyed when they are removed. The reason? "The cloud service providers we spoke to said security, but what they actually meant was risk management," says Mr Hands. "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero."
security (Score:5, Insightful)
But really, after 4 or 5 years of being in a high I/O production environment, do you really want to trust your data on a used drive?
Re:security (Score:5, Informative)
I built a NAS with 8/12 HDDs. Used for movies and the like. Stuff I would be annoyed to redownload, but nothing critical. The other 4 are spares.
I would never run one in my main rig, nor trust it alone with stuff I want to keep.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: security (Score:2, Informative)
Re: security (Score:3)
That has not been true for about 30 years now. Overwrite with zeros and it's gone forever. Any truly sensitive data should be on SED drives so just destroy the AES key and boom the data is as good as gone.
Re: (Score:2)
That does not work with drives younger than 2 decades or so. The surface data capacities are just not there to keep two data layers (the overwrite and the old one). Historically, yes, this attack was possible, but there the actual media capacity was used to maybe 10%. This attack probably still works on modern tape though.
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Then there is the cost wipe them cleaner than clean. That appears to be closer to $100 than the 10 to shred it? Can you sell a hard drive for a $100?
Then there is reliability. A hard drive that is left in rack and has been shown no sign of unusual wear for five years is likely not going to have any big issues crop up suddenly. A
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Exactly. It's physically impossible to mistakenly fail to erase a hard drive which has been shredded into metal shavings. And the data is much, much more expensive than the hard disk.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you could wipe them in one second, would you not crush them?
Some HDDs support that. Everything on the platters is encrypted, and wiping them is as easy and quick as overwriting the key. The drive generates and stores the key automatically, the computer only needs to send the erase command.
It's a shame more drives don't support it. It's more common on SSDs. No affect on performance.
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One? No. A RAID 6 or equivalent composed of them? Depending on the cost and availability requirements, maybe.
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I have some +20 year old drives in everyday service. So long as they do the required job, I don't see why I shouldn't use them. So long as they keep running error-free, they're just as trustworthy as my much newer drives.
My experience across hundreds of HDs is that provided they're in 24/7 use they either fail in the first month, or shortly after five years, or never. Drives that sit idle a long time are more likely to go bad, especially if they already had some years on them.
But as someone once put it, the
Re: (Score:2)
Just erase the data, and then sell them!
Which is what you say when you are clueless about everything that is actually involved. Wiping a large number of drives, and verifying that 100% of them really were completely wiped, is far more expensive that just shredding them.
And you may not even be able to verify that the drive was completely erased -- modern ATA drives have a "secure erase" feature (and many (most?)) SCSI drives do too, but I don't think you can verify that remapped bad blocks were completely erased.
Full disk encryption helps, but configuration mistakes happen, maybe a mistake in provisioning scripts meant that a rack of servers didn't get FDE set up properly and plain text data was written to the drive before it was discovered and corrected.
Re:security (Score:4, Insightful)
Any provisioning or final disposition process that requires human action is a potential security hole through which either honest mistakes or dishonest acquisition can leak data.
Or, put another way, just because drives are being shredded, how can you be certain that all retired drives are processed that way?
Shredding is not the answer. It is only part of the answer.
Re:security (Score:5, Informative)
modern ATA drives have a "secure erase" feature (and many (most?)) SCSI drives do too, but I don't think you can verify that remapped bad blocks were completely erased.
Secure erase doesn't wipe the drive. It has the drive encrypted from day 1 with a built-in encryption key. When you run the secure erase, it erases the encryption key and generates a new one.
Not all spinning drives implement secure erase this way, but it's easy to find out - one way is to run an hdparm query and it will report that a secure erase will take an absurdly short amount of time.
Re: security (Score:2)
Secure erase overwrites the drive with zeros if it is a spinning disk. On SSD's it just generates a new encryption key and give that is 256bit AES it's as good as gone. You do get spinning disks with encryption keys but these are in SAS drives, you can do the same thing as SSD's with them.
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For my government contract work, the contract explicitly states that all storage media must be destroyed when retired, and that wiping is insufficient.
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The goverment chooses this path for the same reason cloud providers do, it works every time.
Re:security (Score:5, Funny)
But then they don't make sure the people destroying them know what they are doing. I went to one place that has a contract to "destroy" old Air Force drives. They had an old lady who would take them apart, remove the controller board, snap it in half, then throw everything away, disc platters intact. She thought the circuit board was the thing that held the data. I could only laugh. :)
Re: security (Score:3)
She is about 5% correct. The controller board has an EEPROM for head calibration data. Could you read it anyway if you had government level money? Probably yes. Can an average consumer read it again without the head calibration EEPROM? Probably no.
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Destroying drives prevents leaks, full stop.
Destroying drives prevents one kind of leak -- the kind that happens when erasing fails. It doesn't prevent drives from being ... how shall we say this? ... diverted to unauthorized sales channels prior to going through the official final disposition process.
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Where I work, I hand a box of drives to one of the guys in the fabrication/machine shop. I instruct that person to physically destroy each drive and put the scrap back in the box. I check the box to make sure it has enough scrap; the drive bodies tend to be in bigger pieces and its easy to see how many there are while the platters are brittle and come back in tiny bits. I think the shop crew has fun with it and enjoys something a little different, one guy likes the hammer, one guys like the vice, one guy li
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That would be some real machine shop fun.
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Re: security (Score:2)
Re: security (Score:3, Funny)
More warrenty (Score:2)
What about reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a really good reason not to use older drives - reliability.
The longer you use a hard drive the greater a chance of failure or dataloss. For most cases it does not make sense to take that risk.
Maybe you could say, older drives could be used in highly redundant RAID systems, but even then you increase risk of more than one drive failure at once which could kill even a highly redundant RAID...
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That's when you load from backup. Because an online RAID is not a backup.
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Using old drives in a RAID is generally fine, especially if you have hot spare.
There is actually good reason to use drives of differing ages in a RAID anyway, you don't want them to both reach the far edge of the bathtub curve at the same time.
The backup is for fat fingers, hacks, and the one in a million time all drives in a mirror set go before the first spare can be written.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't advise using all old drives, certainly. I wouldn't suggest more than 50%.
Re: What about reliability? (Score:3)
My backup of an HPC system uses hundreds of old SAS hard drives that have been cycled down from primary storage. Most of the drives are from 2013. All are in 8D+2P RAID6, must have lost less than a handful in the last year. Of have boxes of spares ready to go.
Ask the Quoted Expert; He Might Know (Score:2)
"What do you mean, you destroy them?" says Mr Hands, relating the story. "Just erase the data, and then sell them! They said the customers wouldn't let them do that. One ITAD provider said they were shredding five million drives for a single customer." Storage devices are typically sold with a five-year warranty, and large data centres retire them when the warranty expires. Drives that store less sensitive data are spared, but the CDI estimates that 90% of hard drives are destroyed when they are removed. The reason? "The cloud service providers we spoke to said security, but what they actually meant was risk management," says Mr Hands.
Greater Fools (Score:5, Funny)
Yea, give your old used hard drives to a crypto company. Would could possibly go wrong?
Re:Greater Fools (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought was whether having old drives thrash pointlessly for years on Chia was worse for the environment than pointlessly destroying them. Seems like a bit of an environmental pot & kettle situation...
Required (Score:5, Interesting)
For some contracts, destroying used drives is required, especially if federal agencies or contracts are involved. I knew someone who worked in IT for the army, and their procedure was to wipe the drive, drill holes in the case, then store them in a safe until a portable truck-mounted furnace would show up to melt them down on-site, then haul the sludge away.
Re:Required (Score:4, Funny)
... wipe the drives, drill holes in the cases, then store them in a safe until a portable truck-mounted furnace would show up to melt them down on-site ...
Kill them dead three times to make sure they ain't comin' back!
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For some contracts, destroying used drives is required, especially if federal agencies or contracts are involved. I knew someone who worked in IT for the army, and their procedure was to wipe the drive, drill holes in the case, then store them in a safe until a portable truck-mounted furnace would show up to melt them down on-site, then haul the sludge away.
You'd have to! Otherwise a Chinese agent would dumpster dive them, whisk them off to China where they'd use Quantum computers to decode the data even if it was actually wiped securely and the data had been encrypted in the first place!
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The only secure computer (or secured disk drive) is one which is powered off, shielded with lead, and fired in a rocket away from us at the speed of light.
Of it's so sensitive to begin with (Score:2)
Re:Of it's so sensitive to begin with (Score:4, Insightful)
Encryption OR secure wiping alone would as close to zero-risk as you can reasonably and realistically get either way, so we might as well just call the zero-risk policy what it really is: wasteful bureaucratic paranoia.
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I disagree with encryption there are a lot of ways remnants can work their way on to the disk but encryption with wiping should work fine. There was a theoretical article about pulling data off disks sometime in the 90s and we’ve never gotten over it.
Anyhow there are a ton of compliance issues as a result and the decision makers are always going to take the safest bets here rather than save money, after all if they need to do that there’s always some uppity dork engineers that can be fired and
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Encryption OR secure wiping alone would as close to zero-risk as you can reasonably and realistically get either way, so we might as well just call the zero-risk policy what it really is: wasteful bureaucratic paranoia.
You willing to bet your salary the NSA doesn't have a back door in disk encryption algorithms?
You'd have to double check your secure wiping to make sure it wipes spared sectors too. I'm sure naïve wiping tools miss them. I'm not even certain really good wiping tools will zero them out as the disk firmware goes to great lengths to make sure you don't know the sectors are there.
I'm sure a 10mm drill bit is simpler and easier. You may want to recycle the magnets and copper but really, the rest of the driv
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You willing to bet your salary that the NSA doesn't have back doors that can access the data while its plugged in?
Nothing is 100% secure and there is no such thing as zero risk, only acceptable risk. If the NSA wanted they could raid any facility and grab every drive in the place.
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The problem isn't so much with the destruction of the data. The problem is with verifying the destruction of the data.
If you're shipping a ton of retired drives off to be resold, how do you know that every one of them has been properly wiped? Human error could let one or more slip out with recoverable data on it. It's as simple as placing a dirty drive in the clean pile by mistake. Now, if you never let an intact hard drive leave the building, just dumpsters full of metal shavings and/or slag, there's
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Of course there is a chance it could leave, you could accidentally drop the drive in the pile shavings and not notice and it could get covered up. Or more likely you have a corrupt employee that just takes it out in their pocket.
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Encryption is actually the safest approach as it practically eliminates the risk of a data leak even if the disk leaks out in production condition. If a disk can leak out of a secure wipe procedure, it could leak out from physical destruction queue just as easily.
I have a couple they can have (Score:2)
One of them might even be 512 MB, although it's been a few years since I pulled them.
They're in the back of one of my closets. Just let me know the address to send them to.
Will this change for SSDs? (Score:2)
Do SSDs have an easy or quick verifiable factory reset?
I'm assuming HD manufacturers don't want reuse as it cuts into their bottom line.
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Windows will TRIM a drive after you quick format it. Attempting to read back sectors through normal means will give you only zeroes afterwards.
So then the issue becomes non-normal means of reading the data out (dumping the chips directly).
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The whole point of TRIM is that the blocks are reset to 0. Flash has to be erased like this before it can be rewritten, so having already erased blocks is faster since you can write to them directly instead of having to erase them first. Dumping the chips directly will also return zeroes.
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Do SSDs have an easy or quick verifiable factory reset?
ATA secure erase command. Takes about 2 minutes and it overwrites the encryption key it was using all along to write the data. If you can't read one sector you can't read any because it means the key is gone.
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem some idiot wants to solve with blockchains.
Here's a clue: if someone thinks blockchains are important, you should avoid taking them seriously, doubly so if they're looking for money.
Re: (Score:2)
But But muh Gartner Quad Chart! sez...
Blockchain is strategic.
-- Dumb CIO
It's nice to have people at the datacenter (Score:4, Interesting)
I rent a half-rack in a small datacenter. I'm literally their only local customer, so when I come in, I usually spend some time bullshitting with whichever one of the four techs is handling ops that day.
They get asked to dispose of EOL equipment pretty regularly, and EOL at this point can mean pretty awesome hardware. Every time I go in, I ask what they have sitting around. My last visit, I was able to grab some idiot's GPU mining setup (SMALL datacenter; they don't charge for power) for the price of their past-due bill, and other times, I've been able to snag some high capacity SAS drives they have stacked up to make their desks to make little forts.
I don't care if this crap counts as having fallen off a truck or that there's a chance that it's got a billion power on hours. I think it has worked out very well for me to date.
Should Be DeManufactured (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
How do they think they're sanitized? (Score:2)
When I was working as a contractor for the federal government, hard drives to be disposed of had to be sanitized. You know what deGaussing does? It kills the drive, too.
Now, it'f they've got a production line to disassemble the hard drive, deGauss each platter individually, and rebuild them, that's one thing....
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When I was working as a contractor for the federal government, hard drives to be disposed of had to be sanitized. You know what deGaussing does? It kills the drive, too.
Now, it'f they've got a production line to disassemble the hard drive, deGauss each platter individually, and rebuild them, that's one thing....
Because even if the data is encrypted and you STILL wipe them repeatedly with patterns, zero's, XOR's, those Chinese agents will swipe them, send them off to China and they'll use quantum computers to recover the data! Thats got to be it.
(That, or laziness. Wait... Federal US government? Ahhhh)
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If a well funded group wants at your disks, they will redirect the shipment to ensure the target drives never reach the shredding plant. You'll still get to see a pile of shreddings, but it won't be your drives.
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If a well-funded group wants your drives, you're probably not shipping them anywhere to be destroyed. It's being done on site, under supervision.
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Most of the firmware is on the platters (unless something has changed). If you wipe each platter individually, you still need a way to write the firmware back to the platters.
Surprised that process changes haven't helped more (Score:2)
However, it is increasingly
Sorry, You're not getting old drives. (Score:4, Insightful)
NIST has a specification 800-88 [duserswill...00-88r1pdf], and most contracts even Civilian rely on that standard for handling obsolete or damaged media. the lowest common denominator is destruction. When failures in other methods occur, it's usually because somebody didn't sanitize obsolete magnetic media following protocol and policy. If I refurb one of my old PCs for a family member or for charity, I always put in a new HDD or SSD, and the old storage is usually shot full of holes at the range.
The only way to be sure is to shred it and avoid having your data accidentally recovered.
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Indeed many compliance standards mandate destruction, this person suggesting recycling is a starry eyed greenie with no real world experience or knowledge.
Data can be recovered from mag drives even after multiple overwrite by expensive means... if data is valuable enough the bad guy has motive and reason for investment.
SSD? guess what, half of drives don't implement the erase spec properly and leave data after bios erase... and if wiping done from program in running OS there are blocks unavailable at any t
Re: Sorry, You're not getting old drives. (Score:2)
What utter tosh. It is easy to wipe drives securely, I do it all the time. Hundreds of the buggers. I am currently putting together my Driveinator MK4 as I have a few hundred more coming up and the motherboard on the MK3 packed in last week. Admittedly it was a nearly a decade old, so this time I am building from all new components.
Re:Sorry, You're not getting old drives. (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago someone offered a prize if anyone could recover data from a HDD that had been fully formatted. Nobody ever claimed it, not even data recovery companies.
Re: (Score:2)
NIST SP 800-88:
> "While most devices support some form of Clear, not all devices have a reliable Purge mechanism. For moderate confidentiality data, the media owner may choose to accept the risk of applying Clear techniques to the media, acknowledging that some data may be able to be retrieved by someone with the time, knowledge, and skills to do so. Purge (and Clear, where applicable) may be more appropriate than Destroy when factoring in environmental concerns"
FIPS 199:
> "Confidentiality High: The
Mr.Hands??? (Score:3)
"What do you mean, you destroy them?" says Mr Hands, relating the story. "Just erase the data, and then sell them!
Oh thank god you’re alive I heard the craziest rumor about you!
Verification (Score:2)
It's easier to build a process around physical destruction.
You see that pile of old drives there? Have they been scrubbed? I don't know.
You see that pile of shredded metal? Have they been scrubbed? I'm pretty certain they have.
AWS destroys all drives (Score:2)
No exceptions, if it was in a data hall, it will be destroyed, even if it is an SD card storing a switch config.
Magnetic recording media is obsolete & unrelia (Score:2)
No encryption? (Score:2)
So why isnt the data fully encrypted on premise? Makes a leak even more unlikely. After all, employees of the shredder could power up drives and scrape for data.
Re: (Score:3)
today's encryption is tomorrows substitution cipher used in future class as trivial to break exercise or joke
No, disks with sensitive data have to be destroyed (Score:2, Insightful)
"Erase them" the joker says.
No, many compliance standards require their destruction.
Older data from mag drives can be scavenged. An SSD has blocks unavailable to you at present during wiping that might contain historic data. Trusting the secure erase from BIOS? Ha, see the paper "Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives" where half the drives tested didn't properly implement the ATA erase standard, so data still left intact.
In short, destruction is the way if there is sensitive data on d
Re: (Score:2)
where is the hard disk degausser for SSD's?
Re: (Score:2)
There isn't one. SSDs are crushed or shredded.
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stun gun across pins could do nicely 8D
anyway, we shred those for compliance, no choice
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I was going to go with a simple 10 pound mallet.
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There should be no sensitive data on any disk. NIST SP 800-88 specifies cryprographic erase. If the org has implemented a state-of-the-art security program, their storage servers should have HSMs that are used to encrypt said data. Simply separating the HSM from the drive meets NIST SP 800-88.
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wrongheaded thinking.
today's crypto is tomorrow's near plain text
destroy the disks, leave nothing to chance!
Companies like to get cheap & lazy (Score:2)
I know this doesn't make me popular around here, but it's kind of the same reason I'm nervous about privately owned and run nuclear power plants. The US Navy can run a plant safely all day long but I wouldn't trust your average skeezy American businessman with something that potent
apple can do better with this (Score:2)
by doing some things in this list
Get the DFU tool to be certificated for wiping and maybe drop the need for an 2th system to be directly linked to it
letting enterprise level customs destroy disks under RMA (dell, HP do have this) with an in the field hard wipe + sending the wiped disk out to recycling / shredding center
putting storage on cards on all systems
selling new storage cards for all systems (needs to run DFU to install)
----------
if must be done at apple service / apple store then must allow customer
Too bad (Score:2)
Nuke from orbit. Only way to be sure. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill: "Hey Bob the Beancounter - those Omaha racks with servers on them that you sold last week... who did you find to clean them?"
Bob: "Um, what do you mean by cleaned?"
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Cost/benefit (Score:2)
It's not just security, it's also cost/benefit. How much am I going to get selling used, out of warranty drives in bulk? How much does it cost me to securely erase the data on them vs just running them through a shredder?
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Has No One Ever Heard of a Degausser? (Score:2)
Alas, it's probably not "economically viable," as it would be labor-intensive and require a clean room.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You could degauss the platters. Once done, you'd end up with a perfectly "smooth" magnetic flux field from which no previous data could be recovered. Re-install the platters and re-format.
Alas, it's probably not "economically viable," as it would be labor-intensive and require a clean room.
Modern hard drives, everything since IDE was invented, don't have the ability to low-level format their platters. They don't have the hardware to do it, they have no software to do so, and without the factory low-level formatted tracks laid out, the drive isn't capable of using those platters.
There's completely different machinery to lay out the low level tracks, in a way that the drive hardware isn't strong enough to modify.
It's as close to "permanent" as magnetic media can have.
If your degausser worked,
Moore's law FTW. (Score:2)
Hard drives are being destroyed because after a few years they're too small to be useful, even if they were as reliable as a new drive (which they aren't).
Add in the risk of data leaking, and old drives become less than worthless.
It might be possible to engineer drives with (relatively) easy to remove platters.
That way, we could could recycle the rest of the drive and still be confident that the data was unrecoverable.
But I doubt they'd be economical even so -- it would probably increase the cost more than
You can't rely on wiping anyway (Score:2)
A lot of people are mentioning the hassle of wiping. I think if you rely on wiping, you're Doing It Wrong.
(This is from a technical PoV only. If you're required to wipe due to an imposed policy, then like it says on the motivational poster: "You gotta do what you gotta do.")
Some types of drive failures don't let you wipe the drive. The drive won't run. Thus, if you want to RMA a dead drive which is still under warranty, then you might have to send it back to the manufacturer with whatever is on the platters
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Remove the damn rails, you idiots! (Score:2)
For variable values of "usable" (Score:2)
These devices are EOL, i.e. their reliability goes down. A storage device failing is usually a major event and a major pain. That said, as long as generic secure erasing of devices is still a mystery to even a lot of tech people, physical destruction is the only reliable approach.
There is also an other factor: Old DC HDDs are usually power hogs, loud, vibrate, have high cooling needs and have small capacity compared to the current generation. Best re-use would probably be as paperweight.
SMR Please (Score:2)
Yes, please destroy the SMR drives.
For the rest why isn't every bit preencrypted before hitting the data bus?
I can just give a buddy of mine any of my drives with no worries as he doesn't have the magic 32 bytes.
No surprise that .gov is a hugely wasteful polluter on this too.
Chia (Score:2)
With the size of the chia plots, even on 20tb+ drives simply copying a single tb, then wiping would make plot recovery close to impossible. Then, you would still need to have the ability to load the plot via a crypto secured method oob.
Yes, I had a large Chia farm like a moron that was 1.5pb. Yes, I used to work for a hard drive (platter and nand) company. Yes, I think destroying drives unless under contract is stupid.
Yes, I work in NAND now and most would think I have a vested interest in purging the platt
Entirely reasonable (Score:2)
They actually recycle the valuable parts: https://quantumlifecycle.com/e... [quantumlifecycle.com].
It is not like "shredding" means it is lost forever. In fact, given these are 5+ year old drives, it is likely the newly built drive "from the ashes" will make better use of these resources. That 10TB drive can become a 20TB today.
Re: (Score:2)
24/7 operation in a temperature controlled data centre is actually a lot less damaging than drives that get spun up and down repeatedly, or subjected to fluctuating temperatures etc.
Re: hard drive shreading (Score:2)
Clearly you have no experience of using old server grade hardware. The backup of the HPC system I look after at work uses hundreds of hard drives recycled from primary storage systems. They mostly date from 2013 though some are from 2017. I can count the number of failed drives in the last year on one hand.
Re: Still data between the tracks and spared secto (Score:2)
That hasn't been true for over 30 years dip shit. Stop recycling papers from the 1980s that dont apply any more and haven't in decades. The densities on any drive from this century is so high there is nothing retrievable from between the tracks. Just writing zeros once over the drive is sufficient.