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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

#31

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pdimitar wrote: post #27

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 procedure…

> If you have principles, this is your litmus test

Principles are often in conflict. There are multiple reasonable solutions to this problem.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#34

Post by hospitalJail »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #28

> 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.

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

Real world and lab conditions are different.

Given how high stakes somethings can be, nothing would surprise me.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#35

Post by toast0 »

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…

> Now why don't these companies keep the drives in-house instead of destroying? That, I don't know.

Keep them and do what with them? If you're an enterprise running many disks, you're generally replacing them with higher capacity disks and the old disks are less useful. Or maybe you have some policy on retiring drives based on age or ssd wear. Or maybe you eliminated a storage tier for whatever reason.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#36

Post by rasz »

manicdee wrote: post #17
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.

Falsehoods like this spreading through populations that consider themselves technically literate is one reason the NIST standard requires absolute destruction. There are methods available that will allow recovery of second, third or even fourth generation data to be recovered from magnetic disks. Writing /dev/zero "over" an SSD won't necessarily accomplish what you expect either.

No one has ever demonstrated those purely theoretical methods even on an ancient very low density drive, or even a floppy drive.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#37

Post by hospitalJail »

slackfan wrote: post #21
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…

>hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high

I just upgraded my 10 year old laptop because I wanted to do AI Art locally.

I ran video games, CAD, cellphone emulators, my programs, etc... on this computer and it still works. Heck, I still use it in a different room now.

Its not the 2000s anymore, we don't need tons of processing power to open web browsers and M$ Office. Decommissioning could be a rare event in the future.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#38

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

rwmj wrote: post #33

My friend once worked at a place where the security policy was that every part of the PC including monitors was crushed and shredded. This was a financial services company, but nevertheless totally over the top.

I recently had a Dell monitor spaz out. Even powered off and powered back on, it was somehow keeping a (corrupted) image of what it had shown when last plugged in to my laptop. It's unclear how that's possible, but others witnessed it.

Had this been during something sensitive being displayed, it might warrant shredding that particular monitor. I have no idea how long the phantom image would have lasted. An hour, a day, a year?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#39

Post by V__ »

pdimitar wrote: post #27

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 procedure…

> "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero."

At some point human error will kick in, a firmware bug will prevent a complete override of the disk, or some new technology will be able to detect overridden data.

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