How to kill hard drives fast and simple

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Originally Posted by Jeremiah

Can you exand on this. I was opperating under the assumption that e-waste dealers wanted the boards and paid up to $10 per pound. The rest of the HD is either Al or Stainless which could be sold as well as the magnets could be sold on ebay. I'm new to this and trying to run the numbers. I would happily send you the HD full with motor smashed if it saved time and made more money.

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Yes you can brake them down and make more money...or sell them from 60 to 70+ cents a pound with out having to do anything to them. That's the same as clean AL if not better than what some people get. So its really on what you want to do...we use to brake them down our selfs...but we don't anymore...it takes alot of time..and that time can be used to do something else that would make more money in the long run.

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Originally Posted by drozenski

Not true. A drive that is not degaused and just shredded can have the data recovered using an electron microscope. The data will not be complete but the pats that are not fully destroyed can have the info read. Though the process is 100's of thousands so it's not something any one will do.

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If you take them apart then this is not an issue and a good point to bring up...this is something that should and should be done. But the hard drive in the chiller and chill it around 18F it will lose all data...drive could still be used.

We have done this to very large drives (over 500gb) before we resell. Even drives that are locked up this can "fix" it. What happens when you chill them down like that they will lose the magnetic field on the disks. Because the disk have a very low magnetic field it is easy to kill with cold.

Are you sure about the "chilling" ? I have left my lap top out side in sub zero weather more than once and has never had any data loss( I live in northern MInn)

Does your laptop have a solid state drive or a normal HD?

For us we use a large degause (however spell it) machine. Of course we are dealing with healthcare info and both wipe the drives with software and then run them in the machine. Never can be too carefull with 50k or more in fines per patient / occurance.

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Originally Posted by pizzaman55792

Are you sure about the "chilling" ? I have left my lap top out side in sub zero weather more than once and has never had any data loss( I live in northern MInn)

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It has worked for me in the past, but it had to stay in there for for a few days...if you put the drive there for a few hours...you can at times get data back that you had lost.

What the cold does to hard drives is pretty cool.