Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Pangolin

Or you could just drop the hard drive from head height onto a concrete floor.

A variation of this technique was popular in my shop in the late 1980s, when the last of “washing machine” style removable disks (whopping 277 MB, multi-platter deals, taking one hand and a bit of arm strength to carry) were retired in favor of disk arrays resembling the PCs of their day – roughly 5” (120 cm) drives, about a dozen of which is a rack the size of compact refrigerator constituted a 1 GB “gigabox”. (After overwriting them with nulls) a few folk with more rural homes took the old disk packs out and shot them with a variety of guns and ammunition. The holed, disassembled, about 18” (500 cm) platters were popular wall decorations for the next decade – I believe there’s still one hanging under some stairs in a data center near me.

Fun as they are, from what I’ve read and been told, physically damaging magnetic media isn’t a very good way to erase sensitive data. Data recovery shops claim to be able to swap the platters out of an inert, dropped hard drive and in most cases read 100% of the data. Apparently most of the damage is to the read/write heads, or sometimes the spindle bearings or motor.

Another obvious drawback to physically breaking old disks is that they can’t be reused. There are a lot of admirable charities in the business of giving “repurposed” or slightly rebuilt old machines to the poor and/or elderly. Where better to hide the magnetic whispers of your enterprise’s deepest secrets than scattered with poor record-keeping through retirement communities, small public libraries, impoverished schools, etc.?