how to destroy a hard drive before disposal

trent

Quick query that someone asked me...
A business has old hard drives in storage that it now wishes to dispose of. However, they are concerned that someone could try and retrieve data from these old hard drives and cause data protection problems for the company as customer details could still be located on the hard drives.
What is the best way to ensure that the hard drives cannot be used again for such purposes. My suggestion was throw them in a bucket of water for an hour before disposing of them.
Anyone any better ideas?

kippy

Sledge hammer.

aidan_walsh

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Smellyirishman

Hammer.

majiktripp

Hammers rarely work,they might break the circuitry on the PCB attached to the hard drive,but yesterday we opened a drive up to hammer the disk mirror inside expecting it to shatter...it didnt,just bent it like it was a soft metal which was weird.....so I reckon take off the circuit board as its only screwed on,destroy that then bend all the connector pins too.Most of the hard drives are designed to take a certain number of G-force (generally stated on the drive) ie.from drops etc so they can be pretty resiliant.

Ruu_Old

Take them apart and burn the disk platters or remove the read/write head from the disks.

is_that_so

Unless you have state secrets on it what else could you possibly have on a HD? Otherwise DBAN is as good as it gets.

kippy

I'll rephrase,
Sledgehammer in the hands of one very violent person.

Caco

Put it in the microwave!

(Not advisable though... could be a bit dangerous!)

Tom Dunne

TBH

liamo

is_that_so wrote:

Unless you have state secrets on it what else could you possibly have on a HD? Otherwise DBAN is as good as it gets.

I take a hammer to any hard drives that I'm disposing of for the same reason that I keep a small shredder downstairs into which goes all mail that I'm not filing.

The kind of stuff that gets shredded contains my name, address, phone numbers, perhaps email addresses, perhaps my bank account number, perhaps my employer's name and address - personal information that I don't want to come into someone else's possession.

The information that gets stored on my computer is at least as sensitive. If I'm disposing of a hard drive I have no interest in trying to sell it, and the time cost in destroying it is more than offset by the reassurance I have that no-one will be retrieving any data off that disk anytime soon. (Well, perhaps the CIA .....)

Regards,

Liam

andy1249

May be a bit extreme for your purposes but this is how the US air force deals with magnetic media including hard drives ,

http://www.datadev.com/datsectypiii.html

http://athana.com/ddequip/v88appian.htm

Also here are some more affordable options , note that degaussing , i.e. , totally destroying all the data on the drive by heavy duty magnetic cycles , is the only totally sure fire way of destroying the data , physically smashing the drive still leaves fragments , which can be read by someone who is determined enough and has the equipment , I guess it just depends on how paranoid you are or how secure you want to be ,

http://www.datadev.com/harddiscdrive.html
http://www.garner-products.com/deghd1.htm

Incidentally , a single drive format does not totally erase data , all the data on the drive can still be read as a format does not deep clean the data , the data can still be recovered by a HGA reader , this involves taking out the platters ( in a cleanroom of course , ) mounting the platter on a spinstand and setting the read write analysers accordingly !!
( As if you werent worried enough already )

http://www.datadev.com/harddiscdrive.html

sceptre

H2SO4 is always good if you can get your hands on some.

Alternatively take them apart first (those screws aren't there for fun) and hammer the crap out of the contents.

Depends on how paranoid you really are.

Urban Weigl

Overwriting the drive multiple times is way more effective than physically harming it or even burning it. Data could still be recovered that way in many cases, whereas there's no way to get it back if it's been zeroed and overwritten with random data several times.

bushy...

Find someone with an oxy-gas torch , it should be very quick and sure, you'd need to put a hole in each one first ( maybe the cover would blow off when tis heated )

BreadBoard

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6105224668328268234&q=destroy+a+hard+drive&hl=en

Ziycon

DBAN works perfect, its used by Tallaght Hospital!

Khannie

A powerful magnet should suffice. Dban should also do the job nicely. Or the sledgehammer thing.

trout

I work in a financial services multi-national ... we've used DBAN for the past two years.

if I didn't have DBAN handy, I would just put the drive in my mum's PC ... that's sure to mangle it beyond all repair:rolleyes:

BigEejit

I work in the storage industry and I know that a lot of banks (had any bank written, but previous poster changed that :P) or secure government dept will use the degausser and/or a furnace, there is nothing left of the hard disk but a blob ...
That dude that took a blow torch to a platter can be 100% certain that there is nothing left ... DBAN probably is very good, but when it comes to very sensitive data, a company director will go for physical destruction over software destruction any day of the week


<edit again> i forgot to mention that DBAN is all great and stuff except when the disk drive is faulty (bad motor/bearing/pcb/water damage etc etc) .... when you want data gone in those cases a degausser and/or furnace is yer only man <edit>

rogue-entity

Random passes, such as that done by DBAN will work against most recovery methods, but if someone, say law enforcement, wants that data badly enough they can use custom equipment to read the underlying magnetic signatures to recover the origional data.

Its like this, your hard drive is like a notepad. When you write on the notepad you leave an impression in the paper. Formatting is like using tipp-ex, you can still scratch it off to reveal the writing underneath. Doing random data passes is like tearing out the page, you get rid of all the data. But, you still leave an impression of your writing on the next page, this can be recovered by giving the paper a static charge and rubbing toner onto the page, the toner will adhere to the impressions on the paper where the writing was. Likewise, advanced data recovery can still read the underlying data on a hard disc.

Binary and encrypted data will be next to impossible to recover as it has to be bit-perfect, one wrong bit and the entire file is unusable. Text files are not so fussy.

So, I will agree with the general concensus, use DBAN, it will do the job you want but if you are paranoid enough then physically destroy the data surfaces with a drill and remove the drive electronics and read/write heads.

trent

Thanks for all the replies.
DBAN isn't an option as the computers have not been in use for the last few years.

hobie

after doing all the banging ..... blasting ..... thumping etc etc why not dig a nice deep hole in the garden and bury it? .....

Just don't let the family dog see you doing it .....

Capt'n Midnight

sceptre wrote:

H2SO4 is always good if you can get your hands on some.

Alternatively take them apart first (those screws aren't there for fun) and hammer the crap out of the contents.

Not so sure it would work too well, the platters have a coating on them. Sodium Hydroxide (AKA Caustic Soda) will dissove aluminium, releasing Hydrogen as it goes. When you try it on a drive it only eats areas where the surface is scratched. It's possible the H2SO4 migh have a similar effect where the protective coating protects the platters or you get a coating. Will let you know when I do.
Had it worked then you could just have a vat of caustic soda (drain cleaner) in a metal bucket and drop the entire drive in (I think the cases are aluminium too) , would take weeks to dissolve but 0 effort involved. Also sandpapering the platters is a lot of work

DBAN has one flaw, IDE drives remap sectors without telling the OS. If the drive never had a corrected bad sector then that's ok, but since drives have about 1% of spare sectors a lot of them can be corrected before the OS gets to know about it. You would need special manufacturers utils to get at this area (or a clean room and fancy gear)

can't find the link to the scandanivan guy who used quantum fireball's for target practice

angle grinders are fun too - wear goggles and gloves and hold the drive in a vise

BTW: as read write heads get smaller they can read parts of tracks, where the head alignment was slightly different to the last time, but this applies more to older drives ( or will existing drives more in the future)

It depends on your level of paranoia, if you are sure that you don't have short data like phone numbers and credit card numbers and believe that only complete documents are of any use then DBAN should be sufficient. New drives are cheap so while it's a shame to destroy stuff that could be reused in africa etc. its just a question of how much you value you privacy.

edit
Maybe SMART reporting should give you an idication if any bad sectors were remapped ?

http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/george/quantum.htm

Since Quantum no longer admits to having made hard drives, the main two utilities they once offered are now available here on our site. Click on the links, and save to a local directory if you need these files.

quaidox

drill straight thorugh the feicer!

Bob the Builder

Hammer, blowtorch, then electro-magnet....

Them Deagussers seem awful expensive, just to fry a hard drive....

hobie

I wonder if you put in a saucepan with salted water and boiled it for a couple of hours, after drilling a few holes thru the housing ? ......

always remembering to bury it in the garden afterwards? .....

oRlyYaRly

And sh*t on it. If only for the experience.

Capt'n Midnight

hobie wrote:

I wonder if you put in a saucepan with salted water and boiled it for a couple of hours, after drilling a few holes thru the housing ? ......

always remembering to bury it in the garden afterwards? .....

boiling in water wouldn't get anywhere neare the curie temerature unless you were using old chrome dioxide audio tpaes