Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Disposing of a broken hard drive

I mentioned this hard drive in another thread. Disk Utility sees the drive but it won't mount.

I want to get rid of the drive, but how do I do that and still guarantee that the data isn't recoverable if I can't erase the drive? Not a huge problem, I know, but I want to render the drive unusable short of using a sledgehammer.

It sounds as if you have data worth at least several thousand dollars on the drive or possibly related to criminal activities or national security. I can think of several options for you to try in order of difficulty and effectiveness;

1. Pass a large extremely strong permanent magnet magnet repeatedly over the surface of the drive
2. Instead of a permanent magnet use a pulsed electromagnet
3. Unscrew the cover of the drive enclosure to expose the disk platters and then do either 1 or 2 above
4. Remove the platters from the drive and use either a hand or bench grinder to remove all the magnetic media from the aluminum platter.
5. Some drives use a glass platter that will shatter when struck with a hammer.
6. Assuming aluminum platter(s) remove them from the drive and run them through a shredder

NOTE: Data could possibly be recovered after 1 or 2 but it would cost anywhere from a few thousand to a tens of thousands of dollars and would likely take many months to analyze and extract anything really useful. Even number 3 might leave some recoverable data given the resources of the NSA, FBI, or AFSS.

Hahaha….good one, we've all been there.

You know, it's interesting. Whenever I've asked that question over the years, I always get a smart-aleck response.

I really did take a sledgehammer to an old drive last. Well, my neighbor did. It was too heavy for me. He owns a metal shop. He had a good time. Any excuse to swing one of those makes his day.

This was years ago. One of my know-it-all friends, who works at NVidia now, wanted to again one-up me by saying that the data was recoverable even after the sledgehammer. I knew that, of course, because I had only damaged the outside of the drive, more or less for fun. I just didn't take the time to mention that it was highly unlikely anyone would try to recover data from this particular drive. But he had to be right. He doesn't call himself a programmer anymore. He's a "software engineer."

I actually was tasked recently to research this topic to see how we should be handling it here. I decided to look and see what the three-letter-agencies recommend to their people. In the USA anyway, everyone except the NSA said that the minimum requirement was basically to "overwrite all cells once". If the media contained classified or above at any point in its lifetime, or if it's used for any purpose at the NSA, it needs to be handled in one of three ways: degauss, incinerate, or shred. (yes, physically shred HDD)

Sledgehammers and bench drills were not on anyone's approved list for data destruction.

If a wipe was not possible on a normally wipable drive, it got the "classified treatment." So that's the government's answer to your "disposal of a broken hard drive" question.

links reviewed:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Securely_wipe_disk#dd
- http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1150550-using-dd-to-securely-erase-a-hard-drive/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method
- http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-security-4/military-grade-disk-wipe-653786/
- http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/OP/docs/policy/state/107-009-005_Exhibit_B.pdf?ga=t
- http://www.killdisk.com/dod.htm
- https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/government/MDG/NSA_CSS_Storage_Device_Declassification_Manual.pdf

the first link's summary included:

I've seen studies done where identical drives had fixed data stored on them, and then one-pass-wiped, and then sent into a mix of places for recovery. NONE of them were able to recover any data. Governments still continue to opt for higher grade security under the assumption that either there is better secret technology available at the nation-state level (which is probably a reasonable bet) or that sensitive data may still be sensitive at some point in the future when more effective recovery techniques are developed. For them (since cost is not a consideration) the stakes are just too high to settle for anything less than "the best available".

If only I had this information years ago. I could've really stuck it to my friend.

If the government has a recommendatoin, I'm sure it's a good one.

Thanks for the long reply. That was a lot of information.