Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

Post by justajot » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

Krisjohn wrote: post #139

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…

I work somewhere that specialises in secondhand enterprise equipment and storage. The answer to your first question is "yes, but they really shouldn't". We're burning more hours than we can spare dealing with drive failures. Sure, we have RAID arrays capable of withstanding multiple failures, but we still find ourselves scrambling to replace drives faster than they're failing, even when they were tested before they w…

Post by Gordonjcp » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #136

Gordonjcp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but how can you determine what the old value was, given that it's now a random value multiplied by a random value with yet another random value added on top? Hard disks don't record zeros and ones...

> but how can you determine what the old value was, given that it's now a random value multiplied by a random value with yet another random value added on top? It's an extremely difficult problem, and in the best case you won't get a complete copy of old data. That's why this isn't an avenue of attack that you're likely to ever encounter. This is the sort of thing that would only be considered by very wealthy attacke…