How to efficiently format 12,000 hard drives

[LoStMaTt]

I have just been told that soon I will have to format 12,000 hard drives so that no data can be recovered from them.......how can this be done efficiently and very quickly?

[drizzt81]

a quick search on "destroy" revealed this:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1010767&highlight=destroy

Adam had to erase 200 hdds. He used a bulk earser, took him ~40-45 hours.

with 12K harddrives:

I would certianly go for this:
http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

and them have the remains molten.

I would recommend either the dual-shear or the quard-shear for your application.

[davidlem]

That quad-shear got me physically excited. OMG

[Zamboni]

Industrial shredder is the fastest. Check with some of the local recycling yards to see if they have a chipper onsite.

Throwing them out flat on the parking lot and whacking them with a 16-pound sledge is probably faster than trying to run them all through a magnet. Hold a neighborhood raffle, $1 a swing!

[piako]

call al gore and ask how they can be recycled, then ask him to turn on his eye sight and hump a globe for ya :D

[EQTakeOffense]

I have just been told that soon I will have to format 12,000 hard drives so that no data can be recovered from them.......how can this be done efficiently and very quickly?

The question is do they have to be useable?

The only way to be sure no data will ever be recovered from them is to destroy them.

[LittleMe]

Can we get a picture of all these drives?

I'd tell you to see if you can rent and industrial shredder that can handle the job of all of them.

[GORANKAR]

If they don't have to be useable, FIRE is your pal.. An oxy-acetylene torch should cut through a drive in a matter of seconds..

Nevermind, if it took 5 seconds each, it would still take 60 hours..


Know anyone with access to C4?

Do they burn trash where you live? An industrial furnace would do the trick, but it would still take 1 person a while to just throw them in..

[MrGuvernment]

yeah Al gore - you know it takes MORE resources to recyle most materials EXCEPT aluminum, for everything else, plastic, tin and such it would cost less and use LESS fresh resources to make new stuff.....

recycling is something that was pounded into our heads and the end result has been total lies and a waste of ALOT of money and resrouces.

[serbiaNem]

yeah Al gore - you know it takes MORE resources to recyle most materials EXCEPT aluminum, for everything else, plastic, tin and such it would cost less and use LESS fresh resources to make new stuff.....

recycling is something that was pounded into our heads and the end result has been total lies and a waste of ALOT of money and resrouces.

We should feed our unused waste to the sun, it gets hungry. No really.. why do we not send all of our shit into the sun instead of having huge landfills?

On topic: Do you have a reaaaaaaallllly large magnet you could borrow?

[unhappy_mage]

yeah Al gore - you know it takes MORE resources to recyle most materials EXCEPT aluminum, for everything else, plastic, tin and such it would cost less and use LESS fresh resources to make new stuff.....
Hey, and then when all the junk is in dumps, you can just start a strip mining operation there!

Like EQTakeOffense said, do you have to re-use the drives after the data is destroyed?

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag1.php/mem/428/1.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=428&type=1)

[MrGuvernment]

^^ exactly KEEP OUR SUN BURNING!!!! :D so it can melt the planet faster as it gets hotter burning chemical waste..lol

[unhappy_mage]

On topic: Do you have a reaaaaaaallllly large magnet you could borrow?
Missed this. You'd need a magnet stronger than an MRI machine (http://science.howstuffworks.com/question698.htm) to wipe a hard drive. There are already strong magnets within a few inches of the disks, used in the actuator mechanism, and those don't erase the data on it. Thus, this isn't a really practical method. Commercial degaussers are available, but they're mostly several tens of thousands of dollars and only a few hundred drives per hour.

Last question: where do you work that you have to do this?

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag1.php/mem/428/1.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=428&type=1)

[Zamboni]

Car wreckers may be another place to look for shredders. They have machines that chop up V-8 blocks, so a pile of drives won't pose a problem.

Better yet, feed them into the crusher and have them made into a 3'x3' cube for the lobby (or the local art museum - someone will buy it). Data3, still life in steel and aluminum.

[osalcido]

We should feed our unused waste to the sun, it gets hungry. No really.. why do we not send all of our shit into the sun instead of having huge landfills?
?

hmm thats a good idea. im sure presesntly its way too expensive to get even a few pounds of garbage up to space, let alone hundreds of tons.

maybe in the future though

[TeeJayHoward]

I can't believe nobody's recommended this yet:

Barret M82A1. Line all 12,000 up in a row, and see how far the bullet will travel through them. Then, repeat with the remaining drives. Data's rather tough to recover when there's a bullet hole through the center of the platter. Tougher if the platters are glass.

[drizzt81]

yeah Al gore - you know it takes MORE resources to recyle most materials EXCEPT aluminum, for everything else, plastic, tin and such it would cost less and use LESS fresh resources to make new stuff.....

recycling is something that was pounded into our heads and the end result has been total lies and a waste of ALOT of money and resrouces.
Let's keep the political discussions in the soapbox, otherwise I'd have to chime in.

[drizzt81]

I can't believe nobody's recommended this yet:

Barret M82A1. Line all 12,000 up in a row, and see how far the bullet will travel through them. Then, repeat with the remaining drives. Data's rather tough to recover when there's a bullet hole through the center of the platter. Tougher if the platters are glass.


let's see:
12,000 x 1.25" = 413 yards.
you'd need a rather large area that is free.

[davidlem]

I can't believe nobody's recommended this yet:

Barret M82A1. Line all 12,000 up in a row, and see how far the bullet will travel through them. Then, repeat with the remaining drives. Data's rather tough to recover when there's a bullet hole through the center of the platter. Tougher if the platters are glass.

There's already a hole through the center of the platter - how do you think they mount it on the spindle? ;)

[ryan_975]

There's already a hole through the center of the platter - how do you think they mount it on the spindle? ;)
he said bullet hole though.

[rayman2k2]

has the OP chimed in yet?

[mrmagoo_83]

1. Where the hell do you work that you need to destory 12K hard drives to secure data? Sounds like the NSA or something lol.
2. Reusable, or not?


I mean seriously, I would think he asked this question in hopes of reusing them, most people understand the idea of destroying a harddrive, there aren't a lot of hackers that go rummaging through land fills just hoping to find a harddrive that some huge company through out and didn't secure erase.

If you want to securely erase them and reuse them, you will have to us a software client to do so. I am not even sure a full zero blank is a true secure erase though, and that takes hours on some drives. By the way what size drives are you talking about?

[Ockie]

Where are you located, I'd like to make some cool videos of drive destruction.


You could always just take the drives with you to a parking lot... and rent a steam roller... cheap and effective.


You could always also go all out and take it to a gunnery range that deals with high powered rifles and fully automatics... .and have them all lined up during free shooting.... record :cool:


I'd like to see a minigun tear through a line of 12,000 drives....




How large are these drives? if they are decent size, I'm sure a good ole erase or proper data reformatting device would suffice and then you can sell them or make yourself your own personal data center :cool:

[drizzt81]

you could just bring them to bestbuy:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wlwt/20060601/lo_wlwt/9303216

they will erase them for you ;)

[TeeJayHoward]

If you're planning on reusing them, Hmmm...

I'm going to make a few assumptions, given the limited material you gave me to work with.

12,000 hard drives = big time. So I'm going to assume that they are SCSI drives, probably from an enterprise or government facility - Both of which, from personal experiences, anyway, normally use hotswappable drives. Also, given the large quantity, I'm going to assume they are relatively small sizes of approx. 9GB.

With these assumptions in mind, I would recommend buying a couple of 15-bay SCSI computer systems. 6 should suffice, but increasing the number of machines decreases the time required by the technician. Place the drives in the bays, use a custom linux cd with a eraser program on it to erase them. All other things being insignificant, it takes about an hour, little more, to wipe a, say, 9GB 10K SCSI drive, fill it with zeros, format, erase, fill with random garbage x8, erase, move the head to a random point, and flush the buffer. If the drives can sustain data at a rate of, let's say, 25MB/s, it should only take 6 minutes for a single fill.

Given 15 hours to wipe 90 disks, it would take 134 runs, or 2000 man hours. Assuming the average IT tech gets paid 60K/year to do this, and works 9-5 M-F, it would take him 3.35 weeks to get this done. The end cost to the company would be (1154*3.35) $3,866 in labor charges, give or take a few bucks. In addition, the price for a machine capable of filling 15 SCSI drives is close to $2000, and 6 of them are needed, which brings the total cost up to $12,000, or $1/drive.

In the end, after all this, I'm sure a VERY determined individual could still recover the information. Convince your boss to instead allow you three weeks and $12,000 in thermite. :D

Edit: Wow, my math is wrong. It's off by ~$4000 :D

[MrGuvernment]

^^^ BUAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH

yeah, thas the best solution, you can trust best buy..LOL




i would love to see the minigun method - or a couple grenads

[LittleMe]

The thermite would be whicked cool, but I'd rather go with an industrial shredder. Just drop boxes of them in at a time, shouldn't take long. Thermite would take a really long time, you'd have to be careful in working with it. Maybe do a few stacks with thermite and the rest in the shredder.

[skudmunky]

Or how bout shredder, then thermite?

[drizzt81]

Or how bout shredder, then thermite?
best idea ever. Make sure that we get some videos :D

[piako]

build a house out of hard drives

[drizzt81]

build a house out of hard drives
I can see it now:

wife: "where did you store our x-mas pictures"
husband: "try the upstairs door"

:D

[cooter]

I think taht everyone is over thinking this. If it was me I would put them in a big metal barrel along with some wood, and soak them in gas for about 2 hours. after that proceed to throw a match into the mix. They should all be melted to a nice gewy mix.

Cooter

[TeeJayHoward]

I think taht everyone is over thinking this. If it was me I would put them in a big metal barrel along with some wood, and soak them in gas for about 2 hours. after that proceed to throw a match into the mix. They should all be melted to a nice gewy mix.

Cooter
Never seen Aluminum melt like that before. Then again, I've never tried.

[Jawadali]

I can't believe nobody's recommended this yet:

Barret M82A1. Line all 12,000 up in a row, and see how far the bullet will travel through them. Then, repeat with the remaining drives. Data's rather tough to recover when there's a bullet hole through the center of the platter. Tougher if the platters are glass.

Lol :).


I mean seriously, I would think he asked this question in hopes of reusing them, most people understand the idea of destroying a harddrive, there aren't a lot of hackers that go rummaging through land fills just hoping to find a harddrive that some huge company through out and didn't secure erase.



It sounded like this is the case as well.

I wonder if a hard drive manufacturer/manufacturing plant (or even a PC assembly plant) would be able to help out with this? But then there is the security/privacy issue.

[TheGodfather47]

Lets's see...grenades?
Nope.

Molotovs?
Perhaps.

A trip to your local gun dealer or Walmart, coming out with a new 12 guage and a lot of shells?
Yes.

[eastvillager]

Install Windows ME on them, that'll make them useless to just about everybody.

[WCES Ryan]

I think it's time to exercise those creative juices. My suggestions consists of 3 small words:

Hard

Drive

Fight

ftw.

[AreEss]

Remove PCBs.
Contact local smelter.
Rent UHaul.
Dump drives sans PCBs.
Done!

Otherwise?
http://www.ics-iq.com/index.cfm/action/product.show/id_product/433e6b6c-3247-49ed-b6f9-16f356acc67a/id_category/8c53de87-f79f-419b-8f6a-9d889d5b97c4

[belmicah]

Not only has the OP not replied to any of your ridiculous comments, there is no information on whether or not they are already in systems, what type of drives they are (SCSI,SATA,IDE), capacity, etc.

To get back on topic, I used to work in a wherehouse that brought in POS (Point of Sale for the Layman) equipment, cleaned it up, fixed it, refurbished it, and resold it. We wiped hundreds of harddrives a day. Most of these were done like 5 or 6 at a time with a program called DBAN for Dereks Bute and Nuke. This program was bootable from floppy, and automatically erased the drives. You should try this barring that the drives are already in machines.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

[Nintova]

Look in the local paper for weddings. Go to a few each weekend, tie a bunch to the back of the happy couples car instead of can's and let me drag the drives around town for a bit. ;)

[TheGodfather47]

You could try Dell's old Clean1k. I don't know if it will work on XP, but if it does, it will take the data on the drives and the boot sector as well.

[swatbat]

I think taht everyone is over thinking this. If it was me I would put them in a big metal barrel along with some wood, and soak them in gas for about 2 hours. after that proceed to throw a match into the mix. They should all be melted to a nice gewy mix.

Cooter

For 12k drives that would be a huge barrel and a lot of gas. Wonder how many miles away you could see it burn?

[belmicah]

Why do all of you keep shitting on this guys' thread? Not very nice IMO.

Anyways, dude, if you want help, you have to reply to your own thread for God's sake.

[piako]

was the op serious you think? :D

[eastvillager]

We wiped hundreds of harddrives a day. Most of these were done like 5 or 6 at a time with a program called DBAN for Dereks Bute and Nuke. This program was bootable from floppy, and automatically erased the drives. You should try this barring that the drives are already in machines.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

That is Boot and Nuke.


I made floppies like that a long time ago and just left them laying around with labels like "Leaderboard Golf" and "Virtual Valerie". You'd be amazed who'd show up lacking a partition map. :p

People need to stop getting pissy about having fun with the thread. The real answers were posted fairly early in the thread. 12,000 drives=industrial shredder, end of story.

[sprocket]

Install Windows ME on them, that'll make them useless to just about everybody.
Best (and cruellest) suggestion yet.

[protias]

Anyways, dude, if you want help, you have to reply to your own thread for God's sake.

QFT

[n3g471v3 d3c1b3l]

or just send them to me... i'll take care of them :p

[WaterIsTasty]

industrial smelter or shredder would be the best, most efficiant option

[LOCO LAPTOP]

You cant use them anymore? why dont u reformat them and sell them on ebay for money :P

[serbiaNem]

Give one to every woman in your neighborhood. Problem solved.

[Aonevm]

how bout taking a nice cruise to hawaii and dump em overboard on the way there?

[Eshelmen]

hmm thats a good idea. im sure presesntly its way too expensive to get even a few pounds of garbage up to space, let alone hundreds of tons.

maybe in the future though
neh instead of recycling i think the government or something should make like a vaccuum thing all the way to space and just dump all trash and stuff out there;)


edit,,

thats exactly what you said

wow..im an idiot

[drizzt81]

Give one to every woman in your neighborhood. Problem solved.
*applauds the chauvinistic comment*

[serbiaNem]

*applauds the chauvinistic comment*

I'm here all week.

[Zamboni]

I'm here all week.S/O won't let you back home 'til then?

[flynlr]

Then there is this Nuke and pave :D
http://www.njrod.com/images/hf/nuke.jpg

[Bbq]

You need one of these.

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/6381/puuoo7cn.jpg

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

LOL at some of the answers so far. :D