Instantly Obliterate Data On Magnetic Media

Preferred data wipe method: Kyle shooting drives with a 50 cal.
 
Strong magnet in a box with a push button switch to kill the magnet if the door is open. AMAZING! NOT!

You can still retrieve the data due to residual magnetic effects. So even if you were able to realign the field for all the blocks, they would not be at the same strength. Run 3 hard drives, for which you write data to in a specific fashion, through the data kill and analyze how the fields change in strength. That should be more than enough to develop an algorithm to salvage data from almost any drive run through the data kill.

All marketing hype. No engineering.
 
Yeah. A 45 acp should do the trick, and easier to handle than a 50 cal indoors.

Wonder if the same can be done with a $25 handle magnet rated at a 250lb pull?. Just put it on top of the hd.
 
Don't really see why this is on all the news sites. On the same token, I don't know why people write over their disks with zeros like.. 7 times, when you can just take a strong-ass magnet and do nearly the same thing.
 
So, it's a big ass ElectroMagnet that looks like a Microwave.

Looks like it would cost 10 grand.
 
Preferred data wipe method: Kyle shooting drives with a 50 cal.

You'd be surprised how much you could salvage from a 50 cal'd drive. If even one of your "special photos" is recoverable, you're done.
 
Oh, and we all know the government will probably build 50,000 of them. We got the money :rolleyes:
 
Yea the NSA has also gone on record to say they can recover a hard drive without physical damage in the vast majority of cases even when strong magnetic fields have wiped out the main stream of the data alignment.

If you want to make sure that no one can reconstruct your data then use some Thermite and melt it. No recovery possible and your 100 percent safe. However you'll have to do this somewhere were the Fire Department won't get called.
 
Take the hard drive and encase it in cement. Future archeological dig will find ancient porn in the future.
 
I wonder if it renders hard drives unusable, either because it magnetizes parts of it or it destroys the low level formatting on the drive.
 
My wife tried to erase everything off my HDD once when she got pissed at me. I got it all back within about 5 minutes. She doesn't even try anymore.

Back in the early 90's a place I worked for had a huge electromagnet (handheld, but heavy) to erase floppy disks. I'm guessing this uses the same thing, just a bit stronger....
 
Take the hard drive and encase it in cement. Future archeological dig will find ancient porn in the future.

2Girls1Cup. Tub Girl. . Steve's Bra. Yea, that's what we want the future us to see. We would be known as the primitive barbarians of the Internet.
 
I like to disassemble the hard drive and destroy the platters individually, by grinding them down on my patio and then shattering them with a hammer.
 
Lol @ all the "you can just use a hammer/gun/whatever" comments.

The point of this is that you're not destroying the drive along with the data.
 
Strong magnet in a box with a push button switch to kill the magnet if the door is open. AMAZING! NOT!

You can still retrieve the data due to residual magnetic effects. So even if you were able to realign the field for all the blocks, they would not be at the same strength. Run 3 hard drives, for which you write data to in a specific fashion, through the data kill and analyze how the fields change in strength. That should be more than enough to develop an algorithm to salvage data from almost any drive run through the data kill.

All marketing hype. No engineering.

On a modern HDD one field reversal in a magnetic domain is enough to securely erase data, period. Residual magnetism could have theoretically been detected from domains in data blocks on very old hard drives with much stronger fields (the kind that weighed 300 lbs and stored a few megabytes) but not on anything manufactured after the early 1980s.

Yea the NSA has also gone on record to say they can recover a hard drive without physical damage in the vast majority of cases even when strong magnetic fields have wiped out the main stream of the data alignment.

That's BS. The NSA doesn't have the capability to defy the laws of physics and never will.
 
That's BS. The NSA doesn't have the capability to defy the laws of physics and never will.

For those with unlimited budgets and unlimited time with super computing power, most known hard drive erasing techniques the data can potentially be recovered (I doubt it's been tested too much). Scientists have been able to recover some data from shredded HDD's (bits and pieces and it becomes a puzzle - but with enough resources, time and money, it can be put together...). There are a few that can't, and those that have sensitive enough data will be sure to completely destroy (DBAN, Magnetic, shred, incinerate) the thing.

For most people 99.9% of the time a DBAN would work great. It's those .1% that have the sensitive data that needs to be never recovered, even if there is that .00000000000001% chance that it could potentially be recovered.

Would anyone go through that trouble? Doubt it.
 
For those with unlimited budgets and unlimited time with super computing power, most known hard drive erasing techniques the data can potentially be recovered (I doubt it's been tested too much). Scientists have been able to recover some data from shredded HDD's (bits and pieces and it becomes a puzzle - but with enough resources, time and money, it can be put together...). There are a few that can't, and those that have sensitive enough data will be sure to completely destroy (DBAN, Magnetic, shred, incinerate) the thing.

For most people 99.9% of the time a DBAN would work great. It's those .1% that have the sensitive data that needs to be never recovered, even if there is that .00000000000001% chance that it could potentially be recovered.

Would anyone go through that trouble? Doubt it.

On a modern magnetic hard drive (especially now that most use perpendicular recording), DBAN is overkill for 100% of the people that use it. One low level wipe is enough to completely and securely erase an HDD from the prying eyes of anyone no matter their resources, be it the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, or the Galactic Empire. There just isn't enough of a signature left on the absolutely miniscule domains of modern platters to ever offer any hope of reliably detecting the previous state of a magnetic field of that domain prior to a new write.
 
My wife tried to erase everything off my HDD once when she got pissed at me. I got it all back within about 5 minutes. She doesn't even try anymore.

Back in the early 90's a place I worked for had a huge electromagnet (handheld, but heavy) to erase floppy disks. I'm guessing this uses the same thing, just a bit stronger....

Deleting references to stored information isn't the same as overwriting sectors. You were able to recover data because your wife hadn't overwritten areas on the disc where the previous data had been stored.
 
For most people a single run of DBAN or similar is enough. It's extremely expensive to recover data specially if the owner has gone to lengths to destroy it. Unless you have a video of you and the queen mother doing the nasty I doubt anybody will put the resources into forensicly recovering the contents of your hard drive.
 
You'd be surprised how much you could salvage from a 50 cal'd drive. If even one of your "special photos" is recoverable, you're done.

Then instead of standard ball rounds, use Incendiary rounds. Maybe even an M79 or M203. :D
 
Deleting references to stored information isn't the same as overwriting sectors. You were able to recover data because your wife hadn't overwritten areas on the disc where the previous data had been stored.

Exactly. :) Never stated it was the same.
 
If you no longer need the drive, physically smash it or cook it in the microwave at work. The hard drives nobody thinks to nuke are the ones installed inside xerox machines. People leave all kinds of sensitive stuff on the copiers at my work.
 
On a modern HDD one field reversal in a magnetic domain is enough to securely erase data, period. Residual magnetism could have theoretically been detected from domains in data blocks on very old hard drives with much stronger fields (the kind that weighed 300 lbs and stored a few megabytes) but not on anything manufactured after the early 1980s.



That's BS. The NSA doesn't have the capability to defy the laws of physics and never will.

Laws of Physics not withstanding , this isn't about that. You think because you applied a strong magnetic current that your hard drive information is gone?

Must be a nice "bubble" world you live in. Go to Google and enlighten yourself.
 
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Laws of Physics not withstanding , this isn't about that. You think because you applied a strong magnetic current that your hard drive information is gone?

Must be a nice "bubble" world you live in. Go to Google and enlighten yourself.

If you've changed the field polarity of magnetic domains in a modern HDD by whatever means, then the data encoded onto them is gone, period... end of story. There is no agency on earth that has the literal magic it would take to overcome that very fundamental limitation of the technology. I don't care what any conspiracy theory website found on google says.
 
Meh. Where I work they have a pneumatic press that pushes through and crushes the hard drive platters.

Go buy a $49 microwave and try that instead. I don't think I'd want to be standing next to it when warming up a drive on high for 2 minutes.
 
While a computer may read information from a hard disk as strictly digital polarities, the reality is that each 'bit' is still physically a magnetic field that's subject to variations in strength, which is why government and financial institutions require multiple passes in order to ensure any residual magnetic charge is gone. Especially when you consider an older or malfunctioning drive, it's entirely conceivable that it's read/write head, while strong enough to alter the polarity in a readable manner, is not flipping the charge to the degree that it could be.
 
Lol @ all the "you can just use a hammer/gun/whatever" comments.

The point of this is that you're not destroying the drive along with the data.

look at that reasonable comment ^^

Easily wipe it and put i back in service makes sense to me, especially the up to 14 at a time version; data centers can quickly wipe previous customer data and put the drives back into service.
 
Well I have all my data on the cloud, where it is 100% secure, and if I want it deleted, I just cancel my account...POOF all the data gone, never to be accessed ever again, by anyone.
 
The point of this is that you're not destroying the drive along with the data.

I recall a situation at a datacenter where someone once tried to reuse 500+ degaussed drives. I'm not sure if any of them worked - but enough didn't that the endeavor was scrapped.

http://www.oss-spectrum.org/Attach2.htm said:
Degaussing hard drives often destroys the drive's timing tracks and servo motors, and usually demagnetizes the permanent magnets of the spindle motor on sealed drives, thus they can seldom be used after degaussing.
 
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