How to securely erase data from hard drives

[Beretta92FS]

Usually when I have old hard drives to dispose of I drill a hole in them to make sure nobody can easily recover any data from them. However this time around I wanted to try something different known as The 9mm Method. Into the woods we go....

Lining up the victims that are scheduled for destruction:



A few new ventilation holes has been made:



Hard drives are remarkably, well, "hard", and a 9mm doesn't easily penetrate. Maybe a bullet proof vest can be made of taping a bunch of drives to an old jacket?





Recovered 9mm bullet:



In the end I had to bring out the .308 to ensure proper penetration, and that obviously took care of the matter.



Have a great Friday everyone!

 

[CDP235]

LOL, I was going to suggest 30-06, but it looks like you found an adequate solution.

 

[Section-9]

Even with the prices for ammo these days, its still cheaper (and a lot more fun) to have a range day for drive destruction than it is to send them to a computer recycler to "destroy" the drives. I wonder if I can expense my ammo as I have about 40 drives that need to see the great null in the sky.

 

[Artifact]

With a cloth, works every time.

 

[Beretta92FS]

Even with the prices for ammo these days, its still cheaper (and a lot more fun) to have a range day for drive destruction than it is to send them to a computer recycler to "destroy" the drives. I wonder if I can expense my ammo as I have about 40 drives that need to see the great null in the sky.

Sounds like a legit business expense to me.

 

[Shark_Cage]

Awesome!

 

[cathouse01]

Never post things that can remind us old-timers of our war stories. When I first got into computers with Honeywell we were manufacturing a drum drive for the Air Force. This was a precursor to disk drives but used a rotating aluminum drum coated with a ferromagnetic recording material with one fixed read/write head per track. These drum drives started causing problems for the Air Force by getting frequent head crashes. (The read/write heads on drums and modern hard disk drives actually do “fly” just above the surface of the disk/drum on the thin film of air pulled along by the rotation of the drum/disk. So they literally can “crash” into the surface of the drum/disk.). The Honeywell engineers asked for one of the failed drums so they could try and diagnose the problem. The Air Force complied by sending them a nice shinny aluminum cylinder that had been etched clean in an acid bath. Since the drum was being used on a classified system, that was the only way they would allow the drum out of the secure facility. Needless to say, this was not very helpful in diagnosing the problem (though I might have been tempted to say “Here’s your problem, somebody dump the thing in an acid bath!).

Eventually they hooked one up to an unclassified system and ran it till it finally failed and then sent that one back. Turns out manufacturing had replaced the original spec'ed recording material with a slightly cheaper version. That cheaper stuff would start to get thrown off the drum over time and redeposit itself on the read/write heads. This changed the aerodynamic profile of the heads and they would eventual start to crash down on the drum surface, each little crash throwing up more media, contaminating more heads until the whole drive failed. Changed back to the originally spec’ed material and all was good.

Now-a-days, they just use big honking electromagnets to erase magnetic media.

 

[drgrant]

I used to literally hack up tons of hard drives with an M1 Garand. The Garand is way more entertaining because if you hit one of those suckers on edge parts will come out and go flying...

 

[hunt4riches]

I can still see one of Hillary's emails on there. Better hit 'em again.

 

[Section-9]

What is great is that the older SCSI drives have the best magnets in them, I have used so many salvaged hard drive magnets to magnetize my tools, fridge magnets, and magnet fishing parts from between my workbenches..

 

[Dadstoys]

.50 cal. round ball out of a black powder does a sweet job too

 

[whatluck]

Dod red book says either degauss or use a sandblaster . I like the latter. Can't recover the data if I convert all the bits to dust.

 

[chuckster]

Last time I wanted to destroy a hard drive I had access to a oxy/acetylene torch, melted it into a glob of lost information.

 

[design]

Note: This is NOT a Hillary Clinton approved erasure

 

[greencobra]

thought about it several times but i end up just storing my old hard drives under my printer table. maybe i'll take a few with me next week and give it a go...that is if i can still see them.

 

[In God We Trust]

Years ago myself and some other guys at work were bored on the range and starting shooting up random stuff. Ammo cans surprised me. Too multiple.45 and 9mm hits to get through just one layer

 

[omega42]

Note: This is NOT a Hillary Clinton approved erasure

That gives it extra deplorable points.

 

[rali]

Dod red book says either degauss or use a sandblaster . I like the latter. Can't recover the data if I convert all the bits to dust.

Last time I wanted to destroy a hard drive I had access to a oxy/acetylene torch, melted it into a glob of lost information.

These methods are rali approved. I remember a LISA paper on retrieving data from “erased” drives and, yeah, physical destruction please. Guy who presented the paper was able to recover data from a degaussed (at some stupid mag field strength) drive, never mind the “writing zeros, then ones, then random zeros and ones” erasing tools.

 

[Christian]

Thermite, the answer is always thermite.

 

[whatluck]

These methods are rali approved. I remember a LISA paper on retrieving data from “erased” drives and, yeah, physical destruction please. Guy who presented the paper was able to recover data from a degaussed (at some stupid mag field strength) drive, never mind the “writing zeros, then ones, then random zeros and ones” erasing tools.

I visited a data recovery facility and they were working on a drive that had been hit with a hammer, set on fire, and submerged in salt water. They disassembled it in a clean room and took pictures of the platters with an electron microscope and were able to get partial data. Ever since then I've stored all my spares in off site storage until I can destroy. Really blew me away how easy it was for them to do.

Oh, and thermite. Converting the binary to UV, radiation, slag, EM flux, and good old fashioned heat is a one way algorithm.

 

[whatluck]

Thermite, the answer is always thermite.

Also makes a good lockpick!

"You used too much thermite"
-Nobody Ever

 

[Reptile]

I visited a data recovery facility and they were working on a drive that had been hit with a hammer, set on fire, and submerged in salt water. They disassembled it in a clean room and took pictures of the platters with an electron microscope and were able to get partial data. Ever since then I've stored all my spares in off site storage until I can destroy. Really blew me away how easy it was for them to do.

Oh, and thermite. Converting the binary to UV, radiation, slag, EM flux, and good old fashioned heat is a one way algorithm.

The subject of the investigation should have used encryption!

I for one enjoy taking out my screwdriver kit and taking the drives apart.

Its very fun to do. I take the platters out and play with the powerful magnets.

Id say that putting a platter in a vice and folding it in half would make recovery difficult.

Before retiring a drive use secure erase and overwrite it 24 times.

Then format with a 4092 bit password that you don’t write down.

 

[AHM]

(The read/write heads on drums and modern hard disk drives actually do “fly” just above the surface of the disk/drum on the thin film of air pulled along by the rotation of the drum/disk. So they literally can “crash” into the surface of the drum/disk.).

This used to be the most overused graphic ever.

Except I can't find any of the originals,
so it's apparently the most copied graphic ever.

Last time I wanted to destroy a hard drive I had access to a oxy/acetylene torch, melted it into a glob of lost information.

 

[Kevin_NH]

The best way to securely erase data from hard drives is to never write the data in cleartext in the first place, and always store the decryption key elsewhere.

Forget the key, and the data is gone.

That said, the high energy methods are a lot more fun.

 

[Fixxah]

Had a client in Belmont who would pick hard drives from trash on the curb and get info from them. He was on the news a few times. He got in touch with most of the previous owners to let them know what he had. Most were freaked out. They paid to get them back. Some were visited by the porn police.

 

[Yazz]

Had a client in Belmont who would pick hard drives from trash on the curb and get info from them. He was on the news a few times. He got in touch with most of the previous owners to let them know what he had. Most were freaked out. They paid to get them back. Some were visited by the porn police.

It's not called a hard drive for nothing!

 

[josie wales]

Sorry....shooting a hard drive is not the answer, one can still pull data off of it. The best way for common folks is to toss them in a coal or wood stove.

 

[Lank]

I generally shoot and/or drill holes in mine, then dunk in a salt water solution for a few days.

Probably not enough

 

[drgrant]

Sorry....shooting a hard drive is not the answer, one can still pull data off of it. The best way for common folks is to toss them in a coal or wood stove.

Lol for typical people it's just fine. Bums or average persons collecting drive parts don't have access to the kind of stuff required to recover the data. If it's actually sensitive(tm) then a different route is prudemt.

 

[whatluck]

Sorry....shooting a hard drive is not the answer, one can still pull data off of it. The best way for common folks is to toss them in a coal or wood stove.

If you have drives that have sensitive data on them, the data should never be cleartext unless you're running some system that doesn't have native support for encryption. LUKS for linux (which I'm 99% sure isn't backdoored) has been around since 2004, and BitLocker (which I'm 100% sure IS backdoored) is easy to use and one of the only MS products that works the way it's supposed to.

Back in 2009 I had someone break into a client's office and steal ONLY a NAS device with unencrypted backups containing some pharmaceutical product PI. They didn't take anything else. Broke the front window, let the alarm go off, crowbared the server room door open, crowbared the rack open, a dozen other servers there, and took just that 2U rack device. They knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it.

Most people say don't encrypt backups, you're transforming the data and it's not necessary if you have physical control, but this example is something to keep in mind.