A friend uses a saws-all (or something of that ilk) and cuts them in half. I'm figuring on taking my old drives to him for that treatment. I don't want to resell them and have a casual snooper recover my data, and I'm not of enough interest for anyone to piece the halves together.
Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#12Hard disks are surprisingly hard to destroy on-demand. There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y
I instantly though it was this (hilarious) one instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M73USsXHdc
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#13Here are few experiments with a 6 inch neodymium magnet with few devices:
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#14A friend uses a saws-all (or something of that ilk) and cuts them in half. I'm figuring on taking my old drives to him for that treatment. I don't want to resell them and have a casual snooper recover my data, and I'm not of enough interest for anyone to piece the halves together.
I use a drill or press at work to do the same thing. Bens s drive in half or put a couple holes in the platters
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#15This is exactly how I got out of a final project in middle school. Wiped my HDD with a Neodymium magnet right before the deadline and claimed my computer was "broken"... Of course this wasn't done for highly paranoid reasons where I needed to ensure the data was really all gone, but funny story nonetheless. People are more sympathetic when they think a computer "randomly" stopped working.
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#16For quickly destroying hard drives, drive big nails through the entire case in several places. Restoration is at least very manual and annoying, in many cases not worth the effort.
If you need more security, building a simple furnace isn't too hard:
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#17Here's my anecdote: In 2006, while sitting at my desk playing a video on the hard disk drive of my Thinkpad T22, I held a single neodymium magnet (harvested from an old hard disk drive) about 6 inches from the left side of the unit (where the ~40GB-ish Travelstar 2.5" PATA disk was located). The video froze, Windows XP blue-screened, and the hard disk drive started emitting a ~10Khz whine. I jerked my hand away from the PC immediately when the whine started.
BIOS would no longer detect the disk on that machine, or any other I tried it on (on both USB-to-PATA and honest-to-goodness motherboard PATA controllers). The drive spun up but made a repeated ticking sound (I assume seeking back and forth looking for servo tracks).
I sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack (because, stupidly, I had billing data that wasn't backed-up on the drive). The report I received back indicated that 80% of the drive's sectors were unreadable.
As an aside: The data I was looking for was ASCII text and Kroll Ontrack was completely unhelpful in just sending me a bitstream image of the drive so I could grovel thru looking for data I needed. Being plain ASCII, their "file carving" tools didn't locate any of the data. (They sent me a "preview" of the data they'd located, and while it got lots of Microsoft Office-format files, it didn't have any ASCII text files). I offered them a 3x multiple of the rate they asked for file-level recovery to simply send me the bitstream image of the disk that they'd already made. They wouldn't do it, and wouldn't even let me pay to talk to somebody who understood what I was saying. I ended up taking a major loss on the billing data I destroyed. I'll never recommend them to anybody.
I won't ever play with neodymium magnets around spinning rust media again.
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#18No. You need to cast it into the fires of Mordor. Or something similar.
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#19Thermite, both fun _and_ effective.
Re: Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?
#20A friend uses a saws-all (or something of that ilk) and cuts them in half. I'm figuring on taking my old drives to him for that treatment. I don't want to resell them and have a casual snooper recover my data, and I'm not of enough interest for anyone to piece the halves together.
What's the risk from simply writing over the drives with zeros, and sticking them in the electronics recycling?
I don't think anything I or my employer has would be worth the effort to recover.