Wouldn't a standard drill press accomplish the same thing, and be a lot cheaper?
Non-diet cola - sugar gums up the mechanical parts and phosphoric acid destroys electronics.
Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#22Better to encrypt your drives. Like ZFS encryption. No need to destroy the hardware in this case and you're also save from someone stealing the server.
I’d say it depends on your use case. In many compliance-heavy fields, there are specific requirements around data destruction, sometimes involving physically destroying the storage medium up to some given standard. I’d assume this device targets that market.
Most data destruction compliance standards I am familiar with allow for cryptographic erasure when the device is encrypted prior to sensitive data being written to it (excluding some specific data-sensitivity levels).
If they are strict enough to not allow for cryptographic erasure (or the data is above a specific sensitivity), this device would likely not be in compliance either -- physical destruction generally requires shredding/grinding to a specific particulate size, or incineration, and this device does not appear to do either.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#23Wouldn't a standard drill press accomplish the same thing, and be a lot cheaper?
Depending on your threat model, a drill isn't even the right tool. This will significantly complicate data recovery and render data where the drill impacts it destroyed, but it will in theory still be possible to decap/analyse platters or nand with a SEM microscope and reconstruct data off the surviving parts of the storage medium. The cost may not be worth it even to some state actors, but such a cost is peanuts to…
"Only sure-fire way is to toss it in one of those big grinders data destruction companies like Iron Mountain have. They even let you watch it go in."
This is what rsync.net does with drives that need to stop existing.
I do, indeed, watch it go in and I strongly recommend a canister respirator when entering a shredding/destruction facility.
I cannot believe the operators of these devices - which are pulverizing glass and circuitry, among other things - don't wear lung protection as they stand over the machine-turning-drive-into-dust.
To my sibling who wondered about sleight of hand:
I can only speak for the machine I take drives to but it is an immediate and brutal reaction with sparks flying and pieces flying up ... and sometimes the machine jams and they back it out and re-feed it ... there is no question as to what is occurring to that specific drive.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#24I recently saw a device that vibrates drives apart into it's components for easy recycling.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#25An awful lot of the destruction can be done with a torx screwdriver:
Step 1: take the screwdriver, dismantle the drive, and remove the platter(s).
Step 2: take the screwdriver and gouge the platters.
Step 3: take the screwdriver, lay each platter across it on the floor and stamp your foot down, hard.
Destroying the metal casing is fun but it doesn’t really do an awful lot in terms of making your bits harder to read.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to be an idiot—I can't tell if I'm looking at multiple views of one thing, or one view each of multiple things, or what. Is this just demonstrating that hard drives are commonly enclosed in oversized enclosures, so that it's easy to position the punch in a way that totally misses the actual electronics?
Those aren't hard drives, they're solid state drives in the SATA form factor which was originally designed for hard drives. SSDs are much more compact than HDDs, so the components are usually all bunched up at one side near the connectors and the rest is just air, thus punching a hole in them at random probably won't achieve anything. Punching a hole through the PCB might not destroy the data either depending on wher…
Thank you for a clear and courteous answer to my silly question. (I am so used to not thinking about spinning hard disks that I didn't even notice that I'd used the term to refer to SSDs.)
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#27I hate to imagine how much ewaste is produced from destroying these drives, rather than simply wiping them and reselling them as refurbs.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#28I hate to imagine how much ewaste is produced from destroying these drives, rather than simply wiping them and reselling them as refurbs.
Some orgs crush entire computers, so crushing just the drives is at least better than that.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#29Wouldn't a standard drill press accomplish the same thing, and be a lot cheaper?
Depending on your threat model, a drill isn't even the right tool. This will significantly complicate data recovery and render data where the drill impacts it destroyed, but it will in theory still be possible to decap/analyse platters or nand with a SEM microscope and reconstruct data off the surviving parts of the storage medium. The cost may not be worth it even to some state actors, but such a cost is peanuts to…
> with a SEM microscope
Not so much anymore. Increasing data density and the two step nature of the technique make it much less applicable. There are newer techniques but they're more expensive and much more sensitive to the physical state of the media being scanned.
I mean this is probably why the CIA and NSA spend so much on tailored access operations and on zero day vulnerabilities instead. Not only is it easier to get the data in flight but it's much more likely to be timely for their purposes.
Re: Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
#30If you happen to find yourself destroying SSDs, try not to make this mistake: https://i.imgur.com/XBbLQEQ.jpeg
I usually "dissolve" mine in a bucket of non-diet cola. Cheap & easy to source. The acid to damage electronics, and the sugar gums up mechanical parts.
SSD stores your data on flash chips.
They are coated and only the connectors are exposed.
You are not destroying anything you just make it hard to access