Decommissioning hard drives

Forget a dozen passes with a formatter. What a waste of time.

Just use a hammer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AebpSXIMyRI

Of course, denting it with an itty bitty hand hammer is a bit pathetic.

Here’s Rick’s hammer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phe3qZ_q9Fk

Much more satisfying. :-)

You should’ve used a floppy hammer for more kinetic energy ;)

Much more satisfying.

Ever heard (you don’t get to see much) the metal equivalent of a wood chipper in action?
Makes a wood chipper sound quiet and produces metal fragments of the same sort of size as the typical wood bits.

There ain’t no coming back from that.
That’s what I call decommissioned. :)

Seems to have partly decommissioned the concrete floor as well.

The police here cut them in half with some type of saw.

For compliance and security reasons I’ve always had HD shredded, where they can’t be securely erased and reused. On several occasions where I’ve done big decommissions, I’ve required a mobile on-site military grade shredder.

Shredding down to 5mm and then reshredding the waste is acceptable, cost is generally per HD with a minimum of 100 IIRC, but with the kind of decommissions I get involved in HD can number in their thousands, so manually erasing becomes impractical.

It’s strangely satisfying and therapeutic watching millions of pounds of HD being reduced to tiny, tiny pieces!

Is it really necessary to reduce them to tiny pieces? (Therapeutical value aside.) Would anyone really have the capability of retrieving data from centimetre sized fragments of disks?

Not having more than the odd drive now and then to decommission, my therapy resides in dismantling them. I don’t worry about anyone retrieving data off the disks really, so I don’t even sand the surfaces off. I’ve got a small collection of these odd little round mirrors will holes in them – some silvery, some bronzy. Sometimes if I need a small piece of aluminium for something or other I cut them up. Here’s what’s left of one after I’ve used a few bits: https://www.deviantart.com/coshipi/art/What-is-it-Why-616296385

Could anyone really retrieve any data from that? I doubt it, but they’re welcome to try. There’s nothing incriminating on it!

Sometimes if I need a small piece of aluminium for something or other I cut them up.

Fasten the magnet blocks to a board (or garage wall) and just place your screwdriver next to one to keep it there. Pretty strong magnets you see.
Also, gives you a screwdriver where the screw stays on the end (if its ferrous).

Fasten the magnet blocks to a board (or garage wall) and just place your screwdriver next to one to keep it there. Pretty strong magnets you see.

8~) Yup – that’s exactly what I do with them. Sadly none quite discernible in this pic – I should take some more pics! http://clive.semmens.org.uk/DIY/index.php?Playroom

They also hold bits of paper onto the front of the fridge. Strong magnets, but with convenient handles to pull them off the fridge when you need to.

You can get away with magnets being quite close. I used to rest a FDD on an old speaker cabinet (with the speakers still in), and it worked fine.

I’ve always taken out HDD platters to deform directly: Just incase the case is toughened. When disposing of any sensitive material, I dispose of the shredded remains in different bins, just to make sure.

How well would this work with old SSDs/USBs though? I saw one TV programme where data was successfully retrieved from a USB drive after a hand grenade attack: They found the flash IC (after digging it out of a wall) and re-soldered it to a fresh PCB. I shall have to rely on random repeat-overwriting more in future.

I don’t know about you, DavidS, but I find I don’t often melt batches of mild steel. I don’t often have HDDs to dispose of, either, but it crops up a lot more often than the steel melting.

Once the platters are out of the case I stop worrying. Anyone who’s really after my (not really all that sensitive) data enthusiastically enough to get data off bare platters has probably hacked my machine over the internet long ago. If my data was terribly sensitive I might run a bit of emery paper over the surfaces, but I defy anyone to extract data from them after that.

Flash chips are a slightly different matter, but once you’ve got them out of the case mechanical destruction wouldn’t be hard at all.

There’s an awful lot of paranoia (or perhaps faux paranoia?) around these things.

simply put it in with the next batch of mild steel you are melting down.

They must do things very differently left-pondian. Around these parts, metal gets recycled…

What do you make out of mild steel? Bullets?

Mild steel is used for all sorts of things, but not normally bullets.

But hard drives aren’t very good source material for mild steel – a lot of stuff you don’t really want in mild steel, and not enough iron to be worth bothering with. Scrap iron’s cheap, and you don’t want it contaminated with aluminium (from the platters). Other elements probably more or less irrelevant in the quantities involved.

simply put it in with the next batch of mild steel you are melting down

Ah, memories of T2 ……

They must do things very differently left-pondian. Around these parts, metal gets recycled…

That’s without even considering what quality of steel you’d end up with by dropping in a mixed bag of selected impurities (those magnets are an interesting mix for a start and that’s metal and metal).
Hardly Sheffield steel quality, probably not chinese steel quality. Maybe that’s why American cars fold so well in the movies. :)

those magnets are an interesting mix for a start and that’s metal and metal

Yes, but as I wrote just above, probably more or less irrelevant in the quantities involved. They’re all elements that dissolve well in iron in small quantities, so unless you’re putting an awful lot of hard drives in your steel, they’ll make bugger all difference. Aluminium, on the other hand, is a serious contaminant in steel…although again, with realistic numbers of hard drives per tonne of scrap steel, probably nothing to worry about. It’s when they get a load of scrap steel contaminated with significant amounts of aluminium that they get really upset…

Mild steel is used for all sorts of things, but not normally bullets.

Enlighten me. I’m trying to think of something that could be produced in a person’s garage or workshed (so likely to be smallish for thermal reasons), probably won’t have much tensile strength as it’s not being cast properly, and if we’re happy to chunk in an entire harddisc, it’s clearly not something where impurities matter (as you’ve pointed out).

The only thing I could come up with was bullets. Didn’t that ready-for-anything bloke in Tremors make his own bullets so he could do something to better shoot the giant worms? Might have been one of the sequels…

Once the platters are out of the case I stop worrying.

I hit mine with a huge mallet. The platters were scratched and somewhat non-flat. That was good enough for me.

They found the flash IC (after digging it out of a wall) and re-soldered it to a fresh PCB.

Sheesh.

I’d just shove it in the microwave until the IC popped. Consider a few seconds for an 800W oven. Yes, I speak from experience.
It’s also how I decommission expired credit cards, tough the chip in them is so damn tiny you might want to consider ‘cooking’ it alongside a glass of water (so there’s something to absorb excess energy).

I’m trying to think of something that could be produced in a person’s garage.

I hope no-one’s really melting significant batches of steel in their garage, but who knows?

Tain’t mild steel any more when it’s solidified, even if they are – whether or not it’s actually some exotic alloy produced by melting a hard drive. If it’s got aluminium platters in it in garage melt quantities it’s completely bloody useless for anything.

Bullets? Suicide. They’d shatter in the barrel of the gun, which ain’t very good for the person firing it. Shot for a 12-bore maybe – if you want to pepper your target (at point-blank range) with metal dust…

I’d just shove it in the microwave until the IC popped

#MeToo. Duff EPROMs taken out of service that way

Fascinating, DavidS. It never occurred to me that people would be recycling tonne quantities on a cottage industry basis in the US (I’ve seen it in India often enough). I was imagining quantities of a few kilograms, or maybe a few tens of kilograms at most. As for solar furnaces capable of melting a couple of tonnes of steel – Wow! If you weren’t the wrong side of the pond, I’d want to come and visit and take a look.

Continues to be fascinating!

a half land dirt road that requires taking a one lane dirt road about 80 kilometers before you get to the smaller dirt road

I’ve got a lot of experience driving roads like that – or not like that, different, but similarly rough – in India! My experience of solar “furnaces” is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller – a couple of square metres of reflector, for cooking – a couple of litres of water to boil rice in, or a kilo or two of curry.

DavidS – How do you manage with Internet connection – deep in the Desert?