Shedder

[Menaice]

Can you actually buy these things or is that something home made. And if you could buy it would something like this be viable for hd disposal service of like 5 dollars a pop to the client and "WOW"fact it would give the client. I personally have over 80 HD that are bad and if i had one of them and was able to swin a 5 dollar HD disposal charge and do it in front of the customer, He would no doubt tell his friends what he saw. Don't you think?
check the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd_O7-rqcHc

 

[MHCG]

Those things are like $20k.

 

[Menaice]

please provide source for the machine plz

 

[14049752]

Those things are like $20k.

You'd only have to shred 4000 hard drives at $5 a piece to pay for it...and imagine the fun you could have shredding everything else! A system giving you fits? "Oooops....I tripped and fell and accidentally tossed it in the shredder."

 

[MHCG]

http://www.datadev.com/hard-drive-shredder.html

$35k for this one.

 

[Menaice]

seems a bit pricey for a machine that does nothing but shred HD's

 

[LunchBox]

I "had" a friend who was in the Air Force working with telecommunications. When a PC or any device that has a HD they would wipe many times over, then stick the HD in a magnet, then take the plates off and stick a grinder to them and them drill holes in them.

I am sure that super classified stuff in HDs will be made sure that it cant be recovered.
The same goes for paper you would be surprised as to how many times the paper will be shredded, burn, mixed with water, set to dry and shredded again.

 

[PatrickB]

Hard Drive Shredder

That is one tough shredder! This type of device is used not just for security, but to break up things so that their component materials may be recycled.

In episode 173 of Security Now, Steve & Leo discuss killing a hard drive. I found it interesting that some hard drives have glass/ceramic platters that will shatter. I would think that dropping them on concrete or giving them a solid whack with a hammer would take care of making those unreadable.

For the others, drill a few holes through the drive and they're done.

Of course, if the drive will be re-used, then many possibilities exist to do a good job of wiping the data:

1. Darik's Boot and Nuke
2. Eraser
3. others

-- Patrick B.

 

[iptech]

When I worked on an MOD site we had a pulverizer that would grind HDD down to little more than dust. It was around £50,000 to buy and it certainly wasn't portable!

We didn't use disk-washer programs as no software producer could guarantee 100% effectiveness, a 99% assurance wasn't enough.

 

[purple_minion]

An easier way would be to either drill a hole and poor in bleach which is an oxidizer and as it sits on the shelf it corrodes and flakes off. It does take a while but I've put platters into a container and it does work. You could also simply open the drive, and either hammer the platters quick or remove them and fold them. I read somewhere on a security site that even a slight bend in the platter makes it difficult to read anything back.

If you have the bits and simply tear it apart I bet you could open and remove platters in under 5 minutes, and then you could hammer the heck out of them (satisfying) or grind them with a grinder. Perhaps a simple chop saw and you could then turn them install little tortilla strips! Actually that would probably be the easiest, almost like a paper shredder.

You could also find/build a large electromagnet. The real ones for demagnetizing have to be very powerful because they have to penetrate the metal housing, however platters outside a drive should demagnetize with much less power. You could even use capacitors to create a very large, quick field to do the work easily, much like the electromagnetic can crushers, or more impressive the coin shrinkers!
http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinker.html

If it can literally shrink a coin made of non magnetic material due to eddy currents you should be good with demagnetizing platters. Hey, maybe that would be a good way of making 1.8in hard drives out of 3.5 in disks?

BTW a good way to destroy cd's/dvd's is to microwave them for 5 seconds. Very cool too.

 

[dhrandy]

Here is another option. It crushes the hard drive and is cheaper.

Specifications

Media Destroyed - Computer hard drives up to 1.62" height (includes 3.5" and 2.5" technology
Power Supply - 120v/60hz/ 1 phase
Power Consumption - 5A @120 V
Destruction Time - 10 seconds cycle for all drive types ( can destroy up to four laptop drives in one 10 second cycle).
Dimensions - 22"H x 10"W x 19"D
Weight - 105 Lbs

MSRP: $ 6,869.96
ON LINE Special $ 4,961.60
GSA $ 4,430.00

http://www.semshred.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1206

 

[Menaice]

now at around 5 grand i could see that being a viable option if you could get away with the customers willing to pay say 5 to 10 dollars for HD destruction. I do it right in front of the customers.

 

[joe3k]

I've recovered data off drives worse than this, lol.

Joking of course

 

[Galdorf]

You do realize that all you have to do is destroy the mainboard on the hd without a functioning eeprom it can never be read again , that is why you can't just grab another mainboard and slap it in , it just does not work that way every drive is unique without proper data alignment is not possible.

 

[abe]

if you get a mainboard that was made in the same timeframe as the original you can read the drive. they do it a lot when recovering data.

 

[Emockler]

1 whack with a sledgehammer and the drive is in a state where it will cost $100,000 to recover the data. If someone were to find 20 drives in such condition in a dumpster, unless the dumpster was outside Los Alamos, who would bother? It's possible to recover the data, but so expensive, unless you know what is on the drive and which one it is, it ain't happenin.

bent platters require an electron microscope.

 

[abe]

just removed 2 platters from an old hd will blend them, like the "will it blend" movies on you tube, no type of micron, or whatever will get that data back.

what do you guys think? will the data be recoverable. the stuff is from a doctors office

 

[TimeCode]

I want one ... BADLY...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXh6RVTuq0&feature=related

Dude, while our pastor was preaching on the 10 commandments, I made an oath to God that I would put a quarter in a jar to donate to charity every time I took His name in vain or used profanity. I was doing so well today until I saw your video. You just cost me a buck!

But that thing was cool!

 

[purple_minion]

1 whack with a sledgehammer and the drive is in a state where it will cost $100,000 to recover the data. If someone were to find 20 drives in such condition in a dumpster, unless the dumpster was outside Los Alamos, who would bother? It's possible to recover the data, but so expensive, unless you know what is on the drive and which one it is, it ain't happenin.

bent platters require an electron microscope.

Wrong, it's Magnetic Force Microscopy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_force_microscopy


Also drilling holes, smacking with a hammer, whatnot will not completely destroy the data. Sure your sister or local competitive business probably wouldn't be able to get it, but it's still there. A local company I know told my family they would take their old computers and drive over them with a bulldozer to destroy their "secrets." Well, it's a waste of a good computer that might be good for charity or whatever, plus I'm 100% sure you could still get the data easily if you were willing to pay to have the boards switched or data extracted.

You need to physically destroy the platters by grinding/sandblasting/melting them. I read an article about someone doing a review of data recovery companies who took an old drive out camping and roasted the drive on the fire. They recovered the data.

Here's another one where the fire was so intense it melted crane girders, the computers fell one story, and they were drenched by the firefighters. (Watch the clip)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/19/data_recovery/

Also it would be a shame to ruin a good drive, even if it's only good for experimenting with, or as a test machine.

And lastly a paper that shows anything more then one or two wipes are not needed.
http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/
(I will ask the question what about bad sectors before wiping, though the secure erase command in drives I believe does ALL sectors.)

I particularly like this quote...

Being that the distribution is based on a binomial choice, the chance of guessing the prior value is 50%. That is, if you toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of correctly choosing the value. In many instances, using a MFM to determine the prior value written to the hard drive was less successful than a simple coin toss.

 

[purple_minion]

I want one ... BADLY...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXh6RVTuq0&feature=related

Yeah, would be cool... I just saw a REALLY big one on Modern Marvels or Dirty Jobs... I can't remember.

Oh yeah, it was MM, it was the episode about the sharpest objects/knives. Apparently those machines take a lot of maintenance because those blades need to be very close together otherwise stuff gets wedged between them. The interviewee compared it to cutting paper with a scissors like normal, or turn the paper parallel with the cutting action... the paper just slides between the blades without being cut.