Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do I detect a reference to Terminator 2?
Some of that was recovered in T3. :D
Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
101–110 of 153 posts
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#102Cryptographic encryption is safe for as long as your crypto is secure. For any company dealing with sensitive data, relaying on it to resell seems like a horrible idea. It’s not hard to imagine sufficiently motivated attacker (likely state sponsored) just buying up drives and waiting few years for when they can easily break the encryption.
> just buying up drives and waiting few years for when they can easily break the encryption.
"Few years" ... "easily" ... yeah, nope.
I'm pretty sure that even 15 year old luks/truecrypt/bitlocker setups are not "easy" to break today, and have very little reason to suspect that current day cryptosystems would be any more likely to get broken in "few years"
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#103The wastage is shocking. Given the huge demand for (and sometimes shortage of) materials (as well as the time, money, and resources involved in creating them) there should be an established and secure process that is security/compliance approved and would allow for acceptable recycling of these hard drives.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#104Cryptographic encryption is safe for as long as your crypto is secure. For any company dealing with sensitive data, relaying on it to resell seems like a horrible idea. It’s not hard to imagine sufficiently motivated attacker (likely state sponsored) just buying up drives and waiting few years for when they can easily break the encryption.
> just buying up drives and waiting few years for when they can easily break the encryption. "Few years" ... "easily" ... yeah, nope. I'm pretty sure that even 15 year old luks/truecrypt/bitlocker setups are not "easy" to break today, and have very little reason to suspect that current day cryptosystems would be any more likely to get broken in "few years"
You do know that state sponsored actors are already archiving encrypted traffic that they were able to tap into, between nodes of interest for them, with the same purpose, of trying to decrypt it later?
"Easily" means very different thing if you talk about script kiddies vs state sponsored actors.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#105Surprised it doesn't mention compliance frameworks as a culprit. NIST 800-88 calls for destruction if the data is highly sensitive and the drive is leaving the organization. Wrt risk management, it's not worth deviating from NIST. https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=91793...
I faced this same problem. My company policy required destruction of data before drives can leave the colo. I even had a hydraulic drive crusher in the cage to crush failed drives.
However. The Linux utility shred can do a multi-pass random rewrite followed by zeros. (That last is critical for the next step) Then to verify, grab a random block and sum the data. If it’s not zero you crush the disk.
Bake that script into a NetBoot image, wipe the boot drive’s boot blocks and reboot.
I decommissioned about $5M worth of servers while preserving the disks. This preserved the hardware for reuse.
If you want to be sure send a random selection of the wiped drives to your data recovery team. They won’t be able to get anything back.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#106This 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…
> 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.
There are RAID levels with N+2 redundancy, or more with some of the fancy stuff.
You're also getting stats from Backblaze, which have the hard drives in a server, constantly powered on, under significant load. A drive that was sitting on a shelf isn't going to be less reliable just because the manufacture date is three years ago and the warranty has expired. A ten year old drive can have the same number of power on hours as a one year old drive.
Moreover, sometimes the data isn't unique. If you need a drive to host a mirror for some Linux distro it's not like you're hosting the only copy in the world.
And if the data is critical, you need better than RAID regardless. What's your plan if a voltage spike takes out multiple drives in the same machine at once? Lightning doesn't care how old your drives are.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#107We 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....
I was looking at cleaning up some of my old drive, and I was basing my decisions on outdated information. At some point in the past it used to be necessary to do many overwrites to truly erase the data, and I was just stuck on that. Took me a bunch of research on modern drives and latest best practices before I was able to convince myself what I "knew" was no longer valid, and things have changed.
I imagine that is where a lot of folks are at on this. Basically: It used to be possible, so maybe it still is. Not worth the risk, lets just go with the old best practices to be safe.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Encrypted and stripped/sharded in most cases. My employer just shredded somewhat new-ish enterprise grade SSD worth a few $M. It hurt to watch :(
Overheard: "Does our Degausser work on SSDs?"
Degaussers don’t work period. I’ve heard the theory that The hard drive case functions as a faraday cage. Whatever the cause the evednce backed method is best. Grab a random selection of drives out of your degausser output tray. You’ll be able to get data off of all of them. Some may even boot. (The above led to our company buying a bunch of crushers)
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Sure, I would! I frequently use hard drives much older than this, and while I know there's an increased risk of failure, it has never happened to me -- so that risk appears to be quite tiny.
Take a look at how failure rates dramatically accelerate once you hit 5 years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ The risk is anything but tiny. "How long do drives last? It would appear a reasonable estimate of the median life expectancy is six years and nine months."
I'm not questioning those statistics, really. Nonetheless I'll continue to go with my own experience on this. I typically have hard drives in use for 7-10 years or so before replacing them for something with higher capacity. This has never caused any issue. And when I replace a hard drive, I keep the old one in storage as an extra backup. I've copied data off of 20+ year old drives from storage without a problem before (although that's a bit different than using them daily).
In any case, should a hard drive fail, it's not of great significance because of redundancy and backups. Also, spinning platter drives usually give plenty of warning of impending failures.
Used hard drives remain very attractive to me.
Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> not doesn't indicate much about its likelyhood of working. T Statistically I would say it does very much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve Also drives can start building up bad sectors that you cannot write to, but may be able to read data from.
The bathtub curve is real, but it's hard to know where it is for a given model and production date. My personal experience is that hard drives often continue working past their warranty date, so I'd guess the other end of the bathtub is closer to ten years than five. I've run server fleets with a few thousand drives, and didn't find the other end of the curve because five year old drives are both out of warranty and relatively low capacity; we would retire systems with old drives because a new system would have much more capacity, rather than because the drives were old, but we still didn't run too many old drives.
> Also drives can start building up bad sectors that you cannot write to, but may be able to read data from.
Bad sectors are a pre-failure indicator. It's totally reasonable to stop using drives when they collect enough bad sectors. My threshold is 10 for drives you don't regularly monitor and can't easily replace, and 100 for drives with automated monitoring and simple replacement procedures.
I wasn't ever able to figure out reliable pre-failure indicators for ssds. In my experience they work nearly perfectly, until they disappear, never to respond to commands again. Thankfully, at a much lower rate of failure (per drive) than mechanical disks.