dban and 35+ harddrives from yesteryear

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Enlitence.Systems

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 3, 2005
Messages
391
So my company is retiring a lot of old computers from storage (1gb-60gb) range and I'm coming across issues where the computer won't even boot with some of these old drives. They seem to be causing issues when attempting to boot to dban as well with some of them not having jumper settings either.

Is removing the platters that hard in reality? we may be looking at this as a solution since dbanning all of them could take upward of several weeks.

Has anyone else encountered this issue with old hardware removal? what method did you use?
 
Just drive a nail threw them, thats it, game over for the drive.

Or you could just take a decent sized hammer and go outside and hit each drive a couple times, game over.

Or, there is machines that make the drives unusable, you insert the drive and it does its magic and the drive is totally useless from then on, takes like 30 seconds or so to kill them ( not sure if it only kills the controller board or the actual drive itself )

Or, there is the cruncher machine that literally breaks the drives into 2cm chunks.

Or, take the drives out to a range and shoot them up ( my preffered option )

There really is no need to remove the platters, as you can destroy the drives without platter removal, just get a small sledge hammer and hit each drive a couple times and that will break the platter or crack them or whatever making the drives useless.

Platter removal is just being anal about security. Especially when its so easy to kill a drive with a hammer.
 
We find the fastest method to destroy them is to remove the platters and bend them. The covers come off via torx screws, you'll see the platters there, quite strong but they'll bend, and once they do, yup...game over. Those drive wiping programs, when it comes to stacks of drives, as you noted...they're slow, painfully slow, glacially slow, agonizingly slow. You could pain the Golden Gate Bridge with a toothbrush faster than you'll get through a huge stack of drives with drive wiping software.
 
DjAfroman.jpg


No but in all seriousness I found this interesting, not what I expected

http://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/30/hard-drive-destruction/
 
We just throw the hard drives in our Cintas shred box. if its good enough for our documents, its good enough for our hard drives. We get a certification that everything was destroyed. Depending on your contract they shred onsite too. Some services won't shred hard drives but our Cintas contract actually had in it that this kind of thing was ok.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
What nails are you using that actually penetrate the platters and come out the other side...without crumpling like an accordian or wet noodle?
Click to expand...

Willing to bet a T nailer will do this (atleast pierce the cover and platters). Expensive if you're using a gas/round driven nailer though.
 
put drives in freezer over night, next day whack each one with pointy end of pick axe.

you get nerdy maracas as end result
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
We find the fastest method to destroy them is to remove the platters and bend them. The covers come off via torx screws, you'll see the platters there, quite strong but they'll bend, and once they do, yup...game over. Those drive wiping programs, when it comes to stacks of drives, as you noted...they're slow, painfully slow, glacially slow, agonizingly slow. You could pain the Golden Gate Bridge with a toothbrush faster than you'll get through a huge stack of drives with drive wiping software.
Click to expand...

Be careful with that, some drive use glass platters. It would suck to be bending one and end up is a face full of shattered glass. :D

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/shattered/shattered_disk_large.jpg
 
O2Flow said:
DjAfroman.jpg


No but in all seriousness I found this interesting, not what I expected

http://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/30/hard-drive-destruction/
Click to expand...

No, I was being serious, we have a fairly strong electromagnet that produces an alternating magnetic current. My boss snagged it on the cheap from a company that offered drive erasing services that went out of business a few years ago.

Edit: Found something very similar to what we use:

http://www.magnetechcorp.com/Hard_drive_eraser.htm

Ours is black and didn't cost quite that much, but same idea.
 
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YeOldeStonecat said:
I think out of many thousands of hard drives, I've seen one or two of those...that was back in the 5,400rpm and <10 gig days and only on a very small handful of drives. You could quite easily tell the glass ones once you removed the cover.
Click to expand...

He is talking about old drives though. I know a lot of the Deskstar 15-60GB drives were glass.
 
So it makes things easier for him if they were glass...it's less work to bend the platters because the actual metal will be thinner and the glass will snap w/pair of pliers.

The deathstar drives were more 7,200rpm speeds....I believe they had issues with glass on that since glass is a liquid and it lost its shape under the higher forces of 7,200rpm drives. We had like..wheelbarrows full of drives which we destroyed, many of which were the deathstars line..I can't recall them being glass..but then again it was a long long time ago when we were whacking drives of that vintage.

These days it's all 100+ gig drives that are being destroyed.
 
If I was doing this for a client, I'd prefer to send it off to some company to have the drive shredded and a certification sent back. I'd do this myself for my clients with either those electromagnets or a drive shredder, but they're pretty expensive (as already mentioned) to pony up and get that for only a few drives a yr. DBAN is a great tool, but at some point you have to realize time != money spent having someone else or something else do data destruction.

I did some brief research for a client of mine looking to dispose (shred) of drives but really couldn't find many that did that. Most were software solutions or sell you the electromagnet or shredder.
 
Last job we gave the drives to the maintenance guys who drilled holes through them as stress relief. They got destroyed by the drill press and then tossed. they were out of my hair so it's all good
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
What nails are you using that actually penetrate the platters and come out the other side...without crumpling like an accordian or wet noodle?
Click to expand...

Nobody said anything about driving nails right through it, all you need is to drive a nail into it, thats enough to cause enough damage to render the drive useless and beyond any means of recovery.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Nobody said anything about driving nails right through it, all you need is to drive a nail into it, thats enough to cause enough damage to render the drive useless and beyond any means of recovery.
Click to expand...

Unless you degauss, physically destroy the platters, or (at a minimum) zero fill the drive, data recovery is quite easy.
 
Contct secure offsite document storage/backup vendors, most will shred the drives and give you a certificate stating they were securly destroyed.
 
I just find it funny that companies (unless contractually obligated) would use offsite shredding. Pretty sure you could pay any $10/hr knucklehead to use a 5lb sledge and an anvil to take care of your problems.
 
O2Flow said:
I just find it funny that companies (unless contractually obligated) would use offsite shredding. Pretty sure you could pay any $10/hr knucklehead to use a 5lb sledge and an anvil to take care of your problems.
Click to expand...

But then you have to have someone oversee that knucklehead to ensure he does a complete and proper job. And then you have to still dispose of the metal waste in bulk.
 
O2Flow said:
I just find it funny that companies (unless contractually obligated) would use offsite shredding. Pretty sure you could pay any $10/hr knucklehead to use a 5lb sledge and an anvil to take care of your problems.
Click to expand...

some of us have better things to do than to post help wanted adds for "knucklehead" or play with hammers during business hours.
 
Berg0 said:
some of us have better things to do than to post help wanted adds for "knucklehead" or play with hammers during business hours.
Click to expand...

You're right, some of us get to play with the hammers during business time too :cool:
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Nobody said anything about driving nails right through it, all you need is to drive a nail into it, thats enough to cause enough damage to render the drive useless and beyond any means of recovery.
Click to expand...

Well, actually you did.
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Just drive a nail threw them, thats it, game over for the drive..
Click to expand...

Or at least attempted to, even though you butchered the English language in your attempt to spell "through". :rolleyes:

Do you know what "through" means?
There's a difference between "through" and "scratch the surface of".
Or are you changing to "into"? I'm guessing you've never done this before, if you've actually attempted to hammer a nail "into" a platter before, you'd realize that you either just scratch it and veer off sideways, or end up going through it. Just driving a nail "into" a platter...that's gotta be quite difficult, platters are thin, I cannot fathom how to control a nail to end up driving it "into" a platter, but not "through it" as you loudly proclaim you're not doing.

And then we enter the topic of multiple platters..if you're not going "though it"...how are you getting to the next platter in the stack? The one underneath it?
 
Berg0 said:
some of us have better things to do than to post help wanted adds for "knucklehead" or play with hammers during business hours.
Click to expand...

Whatever, it's your overhead. Manual labor is cheap and abundant where I come from.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Well, actually you did.


Or at least attempted to, even though you butchered the English language in your attempt to spell "through". :rolleyes:

Do you know what "through" means?
There's a difference between "through" and "scratch the surface of".
Or are you changing to "into"? I'm guessing you've never done this before, if you've actually attempted to hammer a nail "into" a platter before, you'd realize that you either just scratch it and veer off sideways, or end up going through it. Just driving a nail "into" a platter...that's gotta be quite difficult, platters are thin, I cannot fathom how to control a nail to end up driving it "into" a platter, but not "through it" as you loudly proclaim you're not doing.

And then we enter the topic of multiple platters..if you're not going "though it"...how are you getting to the next platter in the stack? The one underneath it?
Click to expand...

I must admit, I have never attempted to hammer a nail into or through one, but I do have 4 inch nails here, solid steel that could easily do it, when i say easily I mean easily, as I have already drove them thrOUGH, 10mm thick steel before.

Ok, getting it started would be a be hard, but there are such things as nail guns, and a nail gun would easily do it, whether knocked into it or through it, into it would go through the top and into the platters, killing the driving dead.

As for the spelling lesson, its the fucking internet and you got the jist of what I was meaning so no need to be stuck up about it, wrt threw and through, even if manually hammering a nail couldnt go the entire way through, it would damage a drive beyond being able to use it and get data off of it.
 
My work place has the most awesome disk destruction procedure. I call it the "Procrastination Stacking Mechanism" (PSM). Basically the drives just accumulate in this portable building outside against a wall and the stack grows and grows and grows. Eventually, at some point in time, all the electrons in the materials of the drives will align, and they will all collapse into each other forming a big mound of molten metal.

Apparently it's very critical that they get destroyed, yet they've been sitting there for years and nothing is being done.

What I usually do at home is open the cover, plug the drive in, let it spin up, and grind the platters clean with a blunt object (will get more physical area then a sharp object). Then bend the platter inward to do the next platter and so on. Doing both sides is kinda tricky, but pretty sure if you lose even one platter, the data is gone. Before doing all this, I'll usually run the linux shred command with randomization.
 
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