How to delete old hard drives

[Pigeon_Droppings2]

Been clearing out the loft for what feels like 6 months!

During the clear out I've found stacks of old hard drives. I've worked thro them all recovered the data + stripped them down.

I'll stick a hammer thro the circuit boards....but the question is what's the easiest way to "manually delete" the spinny things!

I don't really fancy sanding all the faces...sure someone in here has a better idea.

Would citric acid work...they're aluminium I reckon.

 

[The_Yellow_Ardvark]

Burn them.
Either by a fire or a blow torch.

 

[Memmeddu]

Microwave oven

 

[cheb]

custom kitchen delivery

 

[jmp49]

The platters are brittle, just smash them up with a hammer. Bonus free strong magnets for projects.
Once upon a time I worked on a military gateway, and we did this to our wiped disk drives, before the remains went into secure transit to be tipped into a furnace in Wales.

 

[RWD3M]

custom kitchen delivery

That'll be lost on many!

 

[Ubique]

Nail gun.

 

[MetalMonkey]

It depends how permanently you want to remove the data, and how dedicated people are to restoring it.
Realistically if you smash/damage/destroy the platters, it will be good enough. Circuit board doesn’t store anything of any consequence.

Save the magnets though, modern hard drives don't have anywhere near as strong magnets in, and they are handy for all sorts of things.

 

[awemawson]

I squashed a fair few last year in my 60 hydraulic garage press. I don't think anyone will be reading them in a hurry !

 

[julianf]

Data recovery is not at all easy.

I think you have more chance of getting hit by a bus tomorrow than someone deciding to spend a whole load of time and effort recovering unknown data from an unknown hard drive.

If you've taken the pcb off, you're already well into the realm of professional recovery. Some dirty "stuff" inside, and youre onto stripping in clean room enviroments... All to recover your holiday snaps?

Its just not going to happen.

 

[gaz1]

i use a hammer drill with a spike on the end and send it through 4 times to shatter those discs it does work though

 

[Pigeon_Droppings2]

Yea I bagged the magnets...it was clear that as the drives got more recent the magnets got a lot less strong.

Got a nice collection of magnets.

Some of them are/were work drives so I'd prefer a permanent delete.

 

[skotl]

i use a hammer drill with a spike on the end and send it through 4 times to shatter those discs it does work though

Me too. Single drilled hole into the platter produces a ton of ceramic / glass powder. Nobody outside the NSA is going to be able to read anything off it after that.

 

[awemawson]

Data recovery is not at all easy.

I think you have more chance of getting hit by a bus tomorrow than someone deciding to spend a whole load of time and effort recovering unknown data from an unknown hard drive.

If you've taken the pcb off, you're already well into the realm of professional recovery. Some dirty "stuff" inside, and youre onto stripping in clean room enviroments... All to recover your holiday snaps?

Its just not going to happen.

I've probably told this tale before, so at the risk of boring you here we go again : but some years ago we had a Burroughs 2Mb disk enclosure fail - this was 100 heads per side 'fast access' (for the time) with a 20" brass platter nickle plated. Slight issue was that the NATO fleet deployment was on it.

It would have been fine just forcing a head crash (they flew on an air cushion and were pressed onto the disk by pneumatics) but no, the men from the ministry wanted the disk removed and to watch it cut up with oxy -acetylene ! This involved an escorted convoy up the M1 & M6 back to our factory.

... happy days

 

[Mark 5]

Been clearing out the loft for what feels like 6 months!

During the clear out I've found stacks of old hard drives. I've worked thro them all recovered the data + stripped them down.

I'll stick a hammer thro the circuit boards....but the question is what's the easiest way to "manually delete" the spinny things!

I don't really fancy sanding all the faces...sure someone in here has a better idea.

Would citric acid work...they're aluminium I reckon.

Pity really if you have a stack of them, the one in your image, Seagate Barracuda, was a good brand back in the days.

The one you show is a dying breed in as much as it 7200 rpm, such HDs are a little hard to get hold off.

But I understand the security/privacy aspect, destroy and not recycle/sell, wipe a disk and much of the data can be recovered.

Shredding is the most effective method but it costs, other then that, putting holes in them is my prefered method but I wipe the disk/s first, all time consuming if you have several to dispose of.

 

[CompoSimmonite]

I just fold the disc in half

 

[dieselsamurai]

I work on quite a few banking IT support contracts we quite often have to destroy the drives before we leave site with a computer if its not encrypted in any way , standard was drill or punch 3 holes at 120 degrees through the platter if its a 2.5" drive mostly they are ceramic and shatter straight away. To be safe with stuff at home I usually drill then use the press to bend the drive in half.

over the years we have had quite a few situations where data has to be recovered from a dead drive and it is very expensive , I also did a course where the instructor used to work for a company that recovered data for the MOD and he said they have the ability to recover data from even fragments of drives if needed but the cost is astronomical

 

[jmp49]

I've probably told this tale before, so at the risk of boring you here we go again : but some years ago we had a Burroughs 2Mb disk enclosure fail - this was 100 heads per side 'fast access' (for the time) with a 20" brass platter nickle plated. Slight issue was that the NATO fleet deployment was on it.

It would have been fine just forcing a head crash (they flew on an air cushion and were pressed onto the disk by pneumatics) but no, the men from the ministry wanted the disk removed and to watch it cut up with oxy -acetylene ! This involved an escorted convoy up the M1 & M6 back to our factory.

... happy days

They made us send a tape drive for secure disposal, because it had a cache of the write data. Someone tried to explain to them that it was only retained while the drive was under power, but it didnt matter, the entire rack mount LTO had to go off to cardiff in the expensive red secure disposal sacks.
What I always found mad was if you had sensitive data, it could be sent via royal mail post on a cd unencrypted, provided the cd was inside a envelope that had the senders address, and then it was put into a second envelope with the destination address. This was 20+ years ago, I hope they woke up to the stupidity of that eventually.

I had a drive crash and fail to read on one of my own servers and the backup tape had failed and couldnt be restored and it was full of accounting crap and personal stuff, and I had to pay for it to go be rebuilt in a class2 clean room with new pcb and heads etc to recover the data from it. It was duly returned, along with a note to extract the data as soon as possible because it now made a clicky noise! It did read enough to get the data off it though. I remember that it cost 520 quid + vat in 2012, and it would have cost more than that to try to redo all the info it contained if even possible.

 

[Wozzaaah]

Take the lids off and remove the magnets, they're banana-shaped neodymium ones and are extremely powerful.
While you've got them open, physically destroy the platters.

 

[jimbo84]

MACs have disk utility, various wipe options, I’m sure windows will have something similar. The most secure one on the Mac writes over the data again and again, something like 7 times I think, takes a very long time but I doubt anyone is going to bother trying to recover it after that and what was on them in the first place that was so secure that they’d want to try anyway. Then you can flog them and make some money off them, also saves clearing up the mess of shards after they’ve been shattered.