Interconnectedness of all things

Can you please destroy these disks

Monday Dec 24, 2007

I was asked to destroy 8 hard disks for a charity which has little money and has a reason to have concerns about data security. Be assured they are not manufacturing weapons of mass distraction, so paying for the destruction of the disks was not something they wanted to do with their limited money. However, I did want to be 100% sure that when I tell them they were rendered totally incapable of data recovery, I was confident in that statement. Anyway it was a interesting exercise.

Step 1 Remove the platters from the drive. I 1st tried grinding the disk in 1/2, but I was suprised how much metal cutting disk a 3 1/2 Segate drive requires. So I ended up putting them in a vice and breaking them open with a sledge hammer. I always go for subtle if I can, but spindle is held in with a screw with a star shaped head which is smaller than any of the bits I have of that type, so the obvious approach of unscrewing the case would not fly.

Step 2 Extracting the platter from the casing and then burning a pattern in each platter with a electric welder. I would expect some serious bit flipping occurs with that amount of current going through the disk, not mention the heat.

The platters are now in a water filled 300 metre deep lead mine, so should rust away in good time, the casing will go for recycling. The process took me about an hour, but possibly overkill, I feel confident that the data can not be recovered and that the charity also feels secure that old drives are data clean.

If you are curious as to why I am so paranoid, have lunch with Alec Muffet and ask him about this subject!

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Posted at 09:31AM Dec 24, 2007 by clive in General
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I saw this via Alec's blog...

You only needed to get the platters above their curie point and then hit them with hammers to make absolutely sure that none of the original magnetic information was left. If you had a braising attachment for the electric welder that would have done nicely. The plasma flame from that is a good couple of thousand degrees C and would have probably melted the aluminium of the platers and taken them above thier curie points within seconds. Indeed, there would have been little point in opening the drives as you could have melted the casing ONTO the platers at the same time.

Then again, if you wanted the voilent approach, just attacking the drives with a sledge hammer (a number of times) would have (a) made the media hard to read and (b) scrambled the magnetic domains somewhat.

Posted by Stephen Usher on December 29, 2007 at 11:47 AM GMT #

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