How to efficiently format 12,000 hard drives

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LoStMaTt

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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?
 
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!
 
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
 
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?
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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.
 
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.
 
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..
 
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.
 
MrGuvernment said:
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.
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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?
 
MrGuvernment said:
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.....
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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?

 
^^ exactly KEEP OUR SUN BURNING!!!! :D so it can melt the planet faster as it gets hotter burning chemical waste..lol
 
serbiaNem said:
On topic: Do you have a reaaaaaaallllly large magnet you could borrow?
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Missed this. You'd need a magnet stronger than an MRI machine 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?

 
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.
 
serbiaNem said:
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?
?
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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
 
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.
 
MrGuvernment said:
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.
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Let's keep the political discussions in the soapbox, otherwise I'd have to chime in.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
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.
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let's see:
12,000 x 1.25" = 413 yards.
you'd need a rather large area that is free.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
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.
Click to expand...

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

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




i would love to see the minigun method - or a couple grenads
 
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.
 
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
 
cooter said:
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
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Never seen Aluminum melt like that before. Then again, I've never tried.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
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.
Click to expand...

Lol :).

mrmagoo_83 said:
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.
Click to expand...


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

Hard

Drive

Fight

ftw.
 
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/
 
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. ;)
 
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