acid vapor kills hard drives

[Kdawg]

I made the mistake of storing some old hard drives near a closed container of diluted tca acid.

I later discovered the acid destroyed the seal and the acid evaporated, some of it wafting by the hard drives.
Both hard drives are dead. They were working before this incident.

Should've sealed the hard drives in bags.

on the other hand, if you want to purposely destroy some hdd's....

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If by "TCA" you mean C2HCl3O2, not sure what you'd expect to happen storing sensitive electronics next to highly corrosive acid.

A thin plastic bag wouldn't have done anything to stop it, the destroyed seal on the TCA container tells you that much.

 

[Jonnycat99]

I bought a gallon jug of muriatic (HCl) acid to remove zinc on some metal that I was using for a welding project. I had half a jug left when I was done, so I put the cap back on it and put it in the garage next to my stash of stock metal. Over the next six months my metal stash began to rust, with a noticeable bloom pattern closest to the jug where the rust was most severe.

The lid was still in good condition and I tightened it well enough, but there is a reason they put a heat seal on the jug. Needless to say I got rid of the jug.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I had something similar. Had a gallon jug of bleach up in the attic back in the 90s for cleaning out the evap coil once. Forgot about it for 30 years, went up there some months ago and saw a perfectly shaped white mound next to the jug and the jug was empty. Turns out the jug had dry rotted a tiny pin prick hole where the bleach slowly leaked out and was desiccated by the heat, leaving the sodium hypochlorite salt behind.

I just left it where it sat. No way I was going to try and clean up a pile of highly concentrated base flakes, and it wasn't bothering anything where it was. It'll be up there another 30 years.