81–90 of 132 posts
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You throw away the leftovers instead of vitrification and firing the mass into space? /s
A tokamak or a stellerator are also fit for purpose. The advantage is that the toridial magnetic fields that contain the fusion plasma also give the surviving bits another good hammering before vaporisation.
take a hammer to platters to seriously deform them and throw them in the trash.
not recoverable, imo.
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You jest, but jackass security people would probably be dissatisfied that your PII might be accessible to some alien race when after the earth explodes in 5 billion years and some remanent of data is somehow recoverable from an asteroid made of cooled lava. I recall one datacenter consolidation project where the hard drives from decommissioned servers were zapped with a degaussing device, shredded, and then somebody…
I failed an audit once because the inspection team managed to recover data from the information encoded on the event horizon of a nearby black hole. Can't be too careful nowadays.
Edit: wow... that joke went badly.
If you want to get rid of a harddrive with sensitive data I would first suggest that one gets familiar with the thought of not being able to sell it as used. Personally for my drives, I use Boot and Nuke to erase the drive three times, first with zeroes, then with random data, then with zeroes again. After that I disassemble the drive, put a strong magnet over each platter, shredder the drive into almost powder, burn…
Normally you'd want to throw the remains into a volcano but I guess if you feel safe just throwing it away then you do you.
But to put things into perspective with some numbers, the write heads on a modern HDD use somewhere on the order of 50 mA of current. That may sound like a reasonable amount until you consider that the magnetic field [flux] is condensed down to a 60 x 20 nm area. It usually takes a little over 1 Tesla to flip the magnet.
I have been out of the Industry for a little bit now, but things are moving towards a magnetic substrate that has a smaller grain size (allowing smaller bits at a similar SNR) but a coercivity well over 3T at room temperature.
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How about whole disk encryption? When it is time to move on, one simply forgets the passphrase and reformats the drive. Seriously: that is what I'm doing with ssd drives. Anyone know of any issues?
Well your password could be brute-forced unless it's really long and random (about 20 chars). There might also be flaws in the encryption code. And changing it later won't work, because old sectors might still be recoverable, even if they are overwritten.
Later, when you actually reformat the drive, you (or your OS) should spend some extra time writing over the sector(s) containing your encrypted FDE master key. But only those sector(s) need to be securely wiped. Even if someone can brute-force the password you used, they won't have that sector to use to turn it into a decryption key for the sectors; and they definitely won't be able to brute-force the FDE master key itself.
And, to make matters better, in systems with a TPM (most, these days), the TPM holds the FDE master key, and does the job of "shredding" it when it's no longer needed itself, as an async job kicked off by the OS along with the reformat. Also, in such systems, the FDE master key is never loaded into RAM, because the TPM itself does the sector-wise encryption/decryption as a DMA process.
If you want to get rid of a harddrive with sensitive data I would first suggest that one gets familiar with the thought of not being able to sell it as used. Personally for my drives, I use Boot and Nuke to erase the drive three times, first with zeroes, then with random data, then with zeroes again. After that I disassemble the drive, put a strong magnet over each platter, shredder the drive into almost powder, burn…
Normally you'd want to throw the remains into a volcano but I guess if you feel safe just throwing it away then you do you.
Is it really necessary to overwrite the data multiple times to erase it? With the densities provided by today's hard drives, the techniques you used to be able to use to get partially erased data are routinely used by the disk drive itself for normal reads.
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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.
This is what NIST says about it[1]: Advancing technology has created a situation that has altered previously held best practices regarding magnetic disk type storage media. Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearin…
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Yeah, I hope people realise that everybody has these magnets IN their computer. You might have a NAS in which case you have several of these magnets much closer than 6 inches to the other drives and power supply and nothing happens. Magnets near your or even on the computer do nothing.
Magnets induce a current when moved relative to a conductor. The magnets you mention aren’t moving.