GeekNights Monday - Destroying Data

Don’t think of it as “I have to smash it”, think of it as “I get to smash it”.

I’m pretty sure the platters are metal. Not very smashable. I scratched up the top one but the screws holding in the platters are stripped and I can’t really do anything to the rest of them.

Take it to the range with something powerful enough to punch through.

It’s a lot of work to recover data on a drive that has any physical platter damage. Like thousands of dollars worth of work. People don’t generally bother with it when there are so many perfectly intact drives in the trash they can scrape data from.

Yep. It might not meet the standards for COMPLETE data destruction, but a cheap metal drilling bit will make short work of punching through the casing and the platters, putting it beyond salvaging for all but the most dedicated attacker. You can just use a regular twist drill too, it’ll just be slower going.

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I’m Canadian. We don’t have guns :stuck_out_tongue:

If you’re Canadian you’ve got access to rocks. Take the drive and put it on a big rock and hit it with a smaller rock. Repeat until data is pretty much thousands of dollars of recovery efforts.

Hit with hammer or rock until you’re satisfied it will never spin again.

After you smash it, put some pieces in the recycling at different places. Nobody will ever be able to recombine them.

The ecycling company I used to work with used pneumatic punches for “regular” data destruction IIRC. “Secure” destruction usually meant a multipass overwrite and / or physical shredding.

Send it to the hydraulic press channel. I think you can trust them not to look at your data.

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