Hard drive destruction - Page 2

PTS is right- if you have $8500.

If you have a log splitter, you're good to go. For the average person though, it's not feasible to buy a machine like that until you're doing this a lot.

For most drives, bending should be enough. If not, disassemble them, cut the platters into quarters, and mix them.

Thank you all very much, I am not contractually obligated to destroy all of them but I am doing my best to be ethical because I work off of a handshake and a verbal agreement. I will probably just break them down and break the platters

Originally Posted by bcrepurposing

i have commented in past on this but will repeat a bit of what i said before.

removing the boards will deter a average person. not a person intent retreaving your data. it is possible to figure out what board belongs there by trial error on known used parts.
my suggestion comes from experiance. i have 13 years as a repair tech and have done data recovery / sent out mangled devices for recovery so know whats possible.

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It's really not like what you're making it out to be. The most common reason that HDD's die is because of a circuit failure on the logic board somewhere. As hard drive repair goes it's a relatively simple fix.

1: You look at ALL of the information on the front of the drive and locate an identical drive that was manufactured in the same month.

2: There's something like a ROM chip on the circuit board. That stores information that is almost unique to that particular drive. (It's something like a fingerprint.) The information tells the rest of the drive where to go and what to do.

Without that (specific) information the drive will spin up and sit there clicking.

3: The easiest way to transfer that ROM data over to your donor board is to send it out to a company with the equipment to do that job.

Here's where the problem comes in : Somebody hands you a random hard drive where the logic board is completely missing !

The level of difficulty just increased tenfold. All of that ROM information is lost. It takes very specialized equipment to re-discover it.

You're looking at a capital outlay of around 20 grand for that kind of gear and years of training in HDD repair.

True .... it can be done, but why on earth would somebody go to all the trouble for a criminal enterprise ?

There's tons more money to be made in legitimate data recovery and no risk of prosecution.

No doubt Mech .....

You just do what's appropriate for the job. Scrapping is production work so there's no sense in getting bogged down with drilling & fussing with a run of the mill hard drive.

Let's say you were doing curbco and parting out the pc's: You should be able to do do the break down in about ten minutes. From there you sell the component parts to the scrap yard.

Take it a little further: You want to insure that the creepy guy at the junkyard isn't browsing the hard drives. It's really easy to disable the HDD before you sell it. All you have to do is run a utility knife up one side of one of the flat packs and cut the legs.

It only takes three seconds. You don't even have to fuss with removing the board. You can sell the hard drive whole, get a better price, and do the right thing all at the same time.

Turn -n- Burn !

Certified data destruction is something completely different than what your average scrapper needs to worry about.

Originally Posted by spinroch

As olddude says, A stick of dynamite will work, too!

hahahah ... indeed it does. lol

Someone suggested using a 30/30 rifle, but a 12-gauge shotgun shooting slugs and 00 buckshot would probably work too. That reminds me, I have some hard drives and a Rem 870 12, maybe I should go to the range and have a little fun.