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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

#71

Post by crazygringo »

This article mentions disposing of hard drives that have reached their five-year mark and are no longer under warranty.

Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Isn't the whole point that the risk of failure and therefore data loss is too high by this point? Even if you're using them to store data redundantly, you're running the risk that when one drive fails, the backup will also encounter failure due to the stress of reading its entire contents at once in the attempt to create a new backup.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#72

Post by TylerE »

cameronh90 wrote: post #44
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.

Electronic devices keep state in all sorts of strange ways nowadays. If you have the money, the safest strategy is to shred everything rather than having to do a ton of research figuring out whether a given device needs it. For example, lots of people don't realise how many printers are vulnerable to recovering previously printed documents. In the past, you might have just opened it up and ripped out the hard disk an…

Why merely shred, when you can truck it down to your local steel mill and melt it in a blast furnace? Ain't nothing coming back from that.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#73

Post by AnotherGoodName »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #56

There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible. Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt ther…

Secure erase works well. Every other process we have around it has too much room for human error to creep in. From misconfigured drive encryption to a hdd making it to the erased pile without being erased.

Just shred it. You can't mistake a shredded drive for a non shredded drive. The margin for human error is much smaller.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#74

Post by Gordonjcp »

zokier wrote: post #15
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.

/dev/urandom is far better option. One problem is that writing a full drive of data can take long time vs chucking it into shredder. For example this[1] 22TB drive can do 260MB/s, meaning that doing one full disk write pass would take almost 24h. [1] https://nascompares.com/2022/09/12/wd-red-pro-22tb-hard-driv...

In the olden days hard disks wrote data on spinning platters the size of dinner plates with heads the size of Sharpie markers, and the controllers were a Z80 microprocessor on a card with a few kB of ROM and maybe as much as 16kB of RAM.

Everything past those days though, the data is very thoroughly scrambled for spectral whitening before being written to disk so there's no practical difference between /dev/urandom and /dev/zero.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#75

Post by charcircuit »

zokier wrote: post #15
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.

/dev/urandom is far better option. One problem is that writing a full drive of data can take long time vs chucking it into shredder. For example this[1] 22TB drive can do 260MB/s, meaning that doing one full disk write pass would take almost 24h. [1] https://nascompares.com/2022/09/12/wd-red-pro-22tb-hard-driv...

What makes it far better? When overwriting a full drive they are about the same.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#76

Post by hospitalJail »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #56

There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible. Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt ther…

>Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it.

Do remember that winning award is significantly less profitable than selling your secrets to the military.

NSO Group makes more money hacking iphones, than they make on bug bounties.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#77

Post by crazygringo »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #60

The thing I find bizarre about all of this is that 99.99% of the data people think is super important would only be interesting to a few very specific parties. If you format a hard drive, and sell it on eBay through a generic username, then the person who buys that is not going to do some sort of FBI style forensics on the disk. It would be like going through every single bin on every high street on the off chance th…

You don't need FBI style forensics, you just plug in a drive and there are the files, if the drive hasn't been erased.

Are you really OK with things like your bank account information or health records information or your e-mail history showing up on some rando's hard drive they bought from eBay, because it originally came from a cloud provider?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#78

Post by hospitalJail »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #56

There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible. Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt ther…

>Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it.

Do remember that winning award is significantly less profitable than selling your secrets to the military.

NSO Group makes more money hacking iphones, than they make on bug bounties.

(but also I agree with you on the formatting our drives)

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#79

Post by toast0 »

crazygringo wrote: post #71

This article mentions disposing of hard drives that have reached their five-year mark and are no longer under warranty. Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Isn't the whole point that the risk of failure and therefore data loss is too high by this point? Even if you're using them to store data redundantly, you're running the risk that when one drive fails, the backup will also encounter failure due to the…

If you have a good plan to recover from failures and you regularly monitor for pre-failure indicators, that the warranty expired shouldn't be a reason to drop the drives.

A hard drive being in warranty or not doesn't indicate much about its likelyhood of working. There's a market for 5 year old hard drives that seem to be working, and at the same time, if you have budget, replacing your hard drives every 5 years will likely get you decent incremental capacity increases.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#80

Post by WirelessGigabit »

dark-star wrote: post #59

We recently had to destroy over 700 harddisks (10TB) because the customer didn't trust that a secure erase and full overwrite ways enough to make sure no data could be recovered. It was really painful to watch....

Did the customer not use encryption?

I guess I would have trust issues with the services the customer offered.

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