HDD murderers!

[Konrad]

WTF, those savages. There are other ways to utterly destroy stored data while keeping the HDD intact for other computers. No matter how many drives I buy, I still always need more.

Marginally impressive machine, though.

[Airbozo]

I have sent several drives to be shredded at the request of my customer. Even the drives they know 100% have no patient data on, they want us to perform a MIL-Grade data wipe. Takes several days on a 500gb drive PLUS we have to show proof signed by 3 people...

[Konrad]

But ... all those precision stepper motors gone to waste ...

[AmEv]

If only one could design an HDD that could take a magnet to it, and still work afterwards... Even if it just needed a format...

[Airbozo]

Not sure why a magnet wouldn't work. Maybe have to have it directed specifically, but not an issue. I have put HDD's on tape erasers before and a low level format fixed them. That was a longtime ago though.

They do however have self destructing SSD's...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/SSD...AND,15668.html

[Konrad]

People mistrust intangibles. You could expose the HDD to EMP bursts, enough degauss to run a scrapyard, and a full weekend on the wrong end of an X-Ray machine ... and people will still fear the chance of some uberhacker retrieving their data. As a hacker, I'm far more interested in the actual HDD than whatever stupid porn the previous owner was hiding.

But grinding the drive into confetti is visual proof that the data was destroyed. Bonfires and sledgehammers would be cheaper (and more fun, if you're a sadistic HDD murderer), I think.

[Airbozo]

People mistrust intangibles. You could expose the HDD to EMP bursts, enough degauss to run a scrapyard, and a full weekend on the wrong end of an X-Ray machine ... and people will still fear the chance of some uberhacker retrieving their data. As a hacker, I'm far more interested in the actual HDD than whatever stupid porn the previous owner was hiding.

But grinding the drive into confetti is visual proof that the data was destroyed. Bonfires and sledgehammers would be cheaper (and more fun, if you're a sadistic HDD murderer), I think.

Agreed.

Some of our customers are afraid of the possible lawsuits over HIPAA violations so any storage device that may have even been in the same room as patient data gets destroyed before we touch the systems. A lot of the times we don't even get the drive back with any RMA's.

I once had to photograph our forklift running over a perfectly good cisco switch. Same with some perfect workstations and monitors. We've since changed that policy in the name of being green.

[d_stilgar]

I'm not sure why you would need to run over a monitor, but okay, I guess they're paying you to destroy it, not to argue about it . . . or something.

I guess I shouldn't have deleted those videos of a friend of mine and I taking a hard drive out to be shot with our rifles and hand guns.

But for me I see the grinder as a good way to know that there is no way the information will be recovered. I know that you can do multiple writes of random crap to completely remove any trace of what was there, but when I see my drives reaching end of life they are usually also old and small. Like . . . why do I want 20Gb drives again? Even 250Gb seems small to me now, unless it's an SSD.

[OvRiDe]

One of the things the shredder does, is take the human factor out. We have to deal with data destruction as well, and I don't know how many times, I have asked someone if they wiped a drive, only to go back and look at it to find an untouched hdd. I have received hardware from other locations that were supposed to be wiped only to find they still boot up and have the OS from the previous use. Sometimes when we decommission a couple of hundred machines, and have multiple people participating, it can be easy for one or two to slip through the cracks. Another example could be if said wiping software errors out and you miss the fact it bombed out. Basically the shredder doesn't miss any of that.

[Airbozo]

I'm not sure why you would need to run over a monitor, but okay, I guess they're paying you to destroy it, not to argue about it . . . or something.

...

Yes, they had issues with their last supplier scrapping it, then it ending up on ebay (big IRS and FDA issues) so they wanted proof of destruction. For a couple of years we destroyed a lot of stuff and when we told them we could no longer destroy certain products because we are pursuing our green supplier cert, then they worked with us to develop a plan that keeps all of the good stuff off of ebay and out of the garbage. Some things are single purpose electronics so they get recycled.