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Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

bbc.com

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Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#21

Post by slackfan »

pierat wrote: post #9

Now why don't these companies keep the drives in-house instead of destroying? That, I don't know. But aside that, regarding the encryption... If you used the drive without encryption at any time, then its possible to recover the unencrypted data. You'd need to guarantee that your drives were *always* used with encryption from the start to end. And that's a hard guarantee. So yeah, if they were leaving the org, I'd de…

Ah, you have never been on the IT side of any shop have you? The risks to keep running said hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high so you aren't going to be using it. So you decom it and do what, stick it in a closet?

Decommissioned hardware that is put in storage inevitably walks home with an enterprising employee to whom the risks from the business perspective are simply not a factor.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#22

Post by ilyt »

linuxftw wrote: post #14
Gordonjcp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

For an actual HDD, maybe that would work. For any solid state drive, it would definitely not work. SSDs and similar spread writes across pools of blocks for 'endurance', so a 1TB drive might actually have 2TB worth of flash on it.

Flash drives have secure erase for that reason, but writing zeroes would most likely trigger TRIM so most data would be out. Still, only most

>so a 1TB drive might actually have 2TB worth of flash on it.

That's overly optimistic

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#23

Post by ce4 »

bell-cot wrote: post #12

Because (sad to say) at scale, with human nature, you can’t trust that any sort of HD Erasing & Disposal procedure will always be followed.

Exactly, 99.999% accuracy (wrt. to zeroing HDDs) is not enough. And the stop-gap measure for the remaining 0.001% is to have a policy that mandates shredding HDDs.

Maybe until there's 100% disk encryption

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#24

Post by lode »

kobayashi wrote: post #16
ars wrote: post #3

Since when does bbc run ads pretending to be articles? This is an ad for cdi.

Seems like a submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

They also regularly fall for PR bullshit 'articles' from What3Words:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=what3words&d=NEWS_GNL

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#25

Post by veave »

>"You don't need an engineering degree to understand that's a bad thing," says Jonmichael Hands.

Someone without an engineering degree will say it's a bad thing because it seems like pointless waste. Someone with an engineering degree will tell you of reasons why it should be done.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#26

Post by JohnFen »

linuxftw wrote: post #14
Gordonjcp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

For an actual HDD, maybe that would work. For any solid state drive, it would definitely not work. SSDs and similar spread writes across pools of blocks for 'endurance', so a 1TB drive might actually have 2TB worth of flash on it.

> For an actual HDD, maybe that would work.

It doesn't work as well as you'd think on spinning platters, either. Although it does increase the amount of effort needed to read the data on them.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#27

Post by pdimitar »

I find it strange how preachy a part of HN can get about less CO2 emissions and being eco-friendly but then unequivocally support en extremely eco-unfriendly initiative like physically destroying usable storage devices.

If you have principles, this is your litmus test. Show everyone that your principles hold even when there's a risk for you (and that risk is only perceived IMO, and not real if you have good procedures in place; and if you don't have those then you are at risk of many other problems).

Personally I don't find it that hard to have a designated "hard drive exit area" where 1-2 guys' job is basically plugging in HDDs and running `shred` on them (which overwrites them with random data in several passes) all day long.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#28

Post by NotYourLawyer »

> The irony is that shredding devices is relatively risky today. The latest drives have 500,000 tracks of data per square inch. A sophisticated data recovery person could take a piece as small as 3mm and read the data off it, Mr Hands says.

I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#29

Post by rasz »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #5
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #4

Defense in depth is the reason.

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

It wont touch G-List (growing list of weak/defective sectors https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=41352) nor HPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area).

While the second one relies on active attack hiding data for exfiltration, first poses statistically possible scenario where a sector containing sensitive data like password or part of mbox with "We are operating a fucking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro" becomes weak read (still fully completed, but slow) and gets remapped. Anyone with PC-3000 can recover this data.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#30

Post by rhn_mk1 »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #5
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #4

Defense in depth is the reason.

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

Will it though? What if you had some bad sectors which became unwriteable and now contain sensitive data forever?
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