Before you demolish it, take the cover off and have a look inside. If you haven't done so before you will be impressed at what's inside..... or is that just the anorak in me that finds it interesting
Wiping a hard disk
- Thread starter Lord Snooty
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Once a hardware cleanse is formatted (do it twice, to be sure) put it in water along with some washing up liquid for 24-48 hours. that'll rust out all the discs and make any data left unreadable/inoperative.
When i had the pleasure of working for a very security aware organisation, we used to dispose of lots of hard drives taken from laptops etc
Usual method was to drill through the drive, we added the finishing touch, a feck off huge xx tonne hydraulic press
not much left to work with after that
Usual method was to drill through the drive, we added the finishing touch, a feck off huge xx tonne hydraulic press
not much left to work with after that
It takes time to overwrite a disc multiple times.
Most fun is to get out a screwdriver take the casing to bits, see how the drive works, and remove the neodymium magnets to play with later.
Then take your anger out on the disks.
The real professionals would put the drive through a suitable shredder, although perhaps that is overkill!
tom
Most fun is to get out a screwdriver take the casing to bits, see how the drive works, and remove the neodymium magnets to play with later.
Then take your anger out on the disks.
The real professionals would put the drive through a suitable shredder, although perhaps that is overkill!
tom
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What about SSD hard drives ?
Hammer or drill on the chips if you wanna be extra secure.
Multipe data passes to erase properly is a very time consuming operation, as mentioned above. Faster on SSD than mechanical though.
If you are selling old computers remember to disassociate your accounts from the device (Apple I am looking at you
).I never sold any of my old computers apart from a Mac mini that I sold last year on a forum member over here.
This led me to have quite a comprehensive Macintosh collection and... to discover the hard way that you have to remove a device (namely that Mac mini I sold) from your iCloud account before erasing/selling it.
I did several data wipes before giving it away and then the person who bought it had some set-up issues as it was still connected to my AppleID. Luckily he was patient enough to let me try to sort it remotely and then we did on the phone.
Also, years ago I acquired on eBay a MacBook Air for my mother and, despite it being a legit sale (computer wasn't stolen) it was an ex-corporate computer and we had some issues with it initially for similar reasons.
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Ah - got here a bit late....
The answers are all in the thread already:
I got one of the ones that you can just slot a drive into without needing to unscrew it each time, so swapping drives takes seconds.
The answers are all in the thread already:
- A basic Erase won't stop most of the data being recoverable.
- There are multiple pass erase techniques which can be performed but are time consuming.
- Destroying the drive is secure, but they're tougher than they look. Drilling or angle grinding are the quickest.
- Taking a drive apart to see what's in them is really cool and well worth doing
- Hammers work, eventually, but are only advisable if you need to let off steam. There are quicker methods that waste less energy!
I got one of the ones that you can just slot a drive into without needing to unscrew it each time, so swapping drives takes seconds.
Just destroyed one with a hammer the other day.
They are pretty straight forward to take out and you can put the rest to recycling.
Knocking the crap out of it was quite therapeutic and I don't get to do much demolishing stuff.. so quote enjoyable.
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I didn't say it wasn't enjoyable
I gave them the lump hammer and chisel treatment last week; thanks anyway.Ah - got here a bit late....
The answers are all in the thread already:
One thing no one mentioned (and it sounds like it's too late now) is that you can buy a cheap (£5-£10) enclosure and pop the old drive into it and use it as an external USB drive for backups or whatever. I have a bunch of these that I use as 'burner' computers with various operating systems on them for messing around with.
- A basic Er ase won't stop most of the data being recoverable.
- There are multiple pass erase techniques which can be performed but are time consuming.
- Destroying the drive is secure, but they're tougher than they look. Drilling or angle grinding are the quickest.
- Taking a drive apart to see what's in them is really cool and well worth doing
- Hammers work, eventually, but are only advisable if you need to let off steam. There are quicker methods that waste less energy!
I got one of the ones that you can just slot a drive into without needing to unscrew it each time, so swapping drives takes seconds.
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