Stop Scammers: Nuke, Grind or Melt Your Hard Drive
Donating it to charity?
Worried about somebody finding your naughty photos or financial info?
Worried about getting sued 'cause your small business didn't take 'reasonable measures' to dispose of sensitive data?
Then you'll love this episode of Systm, where we get serious about wiping hard drives.
Or, to use more technical lingo, "purging or sanitizing your hard drive.
In part one, Roger Chang (in for David Calkins) walks you thru our favorite tools for wiping drives: Darik's Boot 'n Nuke...
Boot 'n Nuke covers the drive sanitization needs for 99% of you out there.
Part two is for the folks out there that absolutely, positively want to make sure nobody can get the data back off that drive, you need to think physical destruction of the drive... or at least the platters inside that drive.
Tons of commercial drive disposal companies will shred or degauss that drive for you and give you a certificate... it's the easiest thing to to, especially if you have a lot of drives to dispose of.
Want something a little more DIY? The watchwords are disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt.
Thermite is fun, but the thick black smoke (not to mention the ridiculously high temps of burning Thermite) can easily lead to a visit from the fire deparment...
... we suggest your grab the proper sized precision Torx driver and remove the platters.
Then do what we did: grind off the surface, or melt the disks!
We like how Barry used a propane forge... we used a $50 BerzOMatic cutting torch kit... they're cheap and easy to find.
Where was David Calkins this week? At the Austin Maker Faire Austin running the Texas Cup... your basic combat robot mayhem!
More links:
Here's a good read on Guidelines for DoD-level secure erasure
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Started discussion: October 22, 2008 @ 3:03pm GMT
Episode 74 - Stop Scammers: Nuke, Grind or Melt Your Hard Drive [Discussion]
Selling your old computerr? Donating it to charity? Learn how to permanently wipe your hard drives, with and without a blow torch!
Watch or download here.
Informative episode this time, I was hoping for more footage on the physical destruction of the platters, would have been nice to see Patrick get more creative on their demise, like the use of a nibbler.
Informative episode this time, I was hoping for more footage on the physical destruction of the platters, would have been nice to see Patrick get more creative on their demise, like the use of a nibbler.
I like the one for the monitors. At one Nasa facility they did the disk wiping and the destroying of the drives.
If you destroy the platters, can you save the motors and electronic parts for robotic projects? I wonder what would happen if you barbecued the platters?
Just find a nice, quiet, safe place to use it, and bring a CO2 fire extinguisher (NOT WATER), just in case.
Professional services? Trust No One.
Responsible, recycle, reuse? Trust No One. Besides, hard drives are what, $100-ish for 750 GB? They're CHEAP. Also, it sounds like most of the charitable places you can send your hard drives to for reuse are students who have little better to do than spend hours trying to read data off their new previously used hard drive.
If you are going to permanently retire a hard drive and you want its data gone forever, find a nice spot in the country, and buy some tiny flower pots.
There was no "project" here, there was nothing to show. The only thing even slightly challenging was finding a torch.
Melting the disk was kinda fun, worth a two minute clip. Where was the real show?
If you destroy the platters, can you save the motors and electronic parts for robotic projects? I wonder what would happen if you barbecued the platters?
If its a charcoal barbe it might get hot enough, if you sit the platters in the fire, to erase them. I don't think they'd melt too much. One that runs off propane probably would do the same, get it hot enough to make it unreadable, but I'm not sure. 500F is as hot as my gas barbecue could get. My forge can get steel up to around 2100-2300F. I can't melt it, but I can melt glass and aluminum in there.
The NSA actually rates it more secure than the overwriting utilities like boot and nuke.
more info and a link to a program that accesses the secure erase feature at:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=129
(I did notice that it did not see my USB external drives when I tried it)
There are also hardware devices that will access the secure erase feature built into your drives.
The PRO version of this device supports secure erase.
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/Drive_eRazer.php
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