Disposing of hard drive

Factual Questions
1

I had a drive die on me, as they do, and I took it apart to bash the disks a bit, just in case, because there was personal info on it.

  1. In the future I should just buy a powerful magnet and safe myself the hassle, right?

  2. The drive itself is actually kind of beautiful–full of precision made parts. I sort of regretted doing violence to it. But my real question–is there really nothing to be salvaged from a dead drive? We have electronics recycling in California, but I assume that’s much more about segregating the nasty chemicals from groundwater than actually re-using any parts.

  3. The drive was branded as a Glyph, which was sold to me as a quality, long-lasting drive (and it did last a long time). But in opening it up, I discovered that the actual drive was a Seagate. Is the dirty secret of hard drives that the guts are all made by the same company, or just a few companies? Did Glyph really add any value?

2

There’s no permanent magnet powerful enough to erase a drive reliably without removing the platters.
Physical destruction is the best.

3

I would use a wipe tool like Darik’s Boot and Nuke, then give the drive to a service that recycles electronics and disposes of them properly.

4

At work we take them apart and shatter the platters into little bits.

The magnets inside the drive are pretty powerful, as in powerful enough to put a big BE CAREFUL warning if you take them out and play with them. If you pinch your finger between one of those magnets and say a file cabinet, you can do some serious damage to your finger.

I haven’t managed to hurt myself with one yet.

I also occasionally take apart an old drive and just leave it on my desk as a conversation item. You are guaranteed to end up with fingerprints on the platters.

5

As for your second question, there’s only a bare handful of hard drive manufacturers left in the world. Through consolidations, these are pretty much all that are left:
Seagate
Western Digital
Toshiba

6

Hm, this one was more difficult to disassemble than usual, couldn’t get the disks out to fully destroy them, so I just put a bunch of dents in with a hammer. Should I try harder?

7

As confirmed on this list of computer hardware manufacturers.

8

So is it better/cheaper to buy direct from these companies, or is there added value depending on the brand (eg Glyph, LaCie, etc).

9

There’s very little value to be added by the external drive guys.
Sometimes, they may produce a nice, solid case with good heat dissipation, and that might be better than the mass-market stuff that the OEMs make, but generally speaking, I’d save my dough.

These days, I don’t even buy external drives anymore. I use bare drives with a power supply and a SAT-USB3 adapter to back my machines up for off-site storage.

10

You don’t even need to take them apart. Hard drives are built with such immensely high precision that all it takes is one (or two) good smacks with a hammer, brick, rock etc. and its data is hopelessly irretrievable. If it was a smashed drive used by ISIS the FBI could try and scan the platters with an electron microscope and piece some data back together bit by bit, but it would be both very time consuming and phenomenally expensive.

11

The added value is only when they provide their extended warranties. Glyph not only replaces failed drives, but they also provide basic data recovery services–a convenient service to have.

And, this. Magnets are not likely to do anything, but a short, sharp, shock will make the drive unusable to all but the most sophisticated parties.

12

While banging on a drive may be effective and cathartic, using a wipe tool such as DBAN is easy and provides feedback on whether it succeeded. For a normal person who just wants to keep their personal data out of the hands of crooks – or even law enforcement – that’s all you need.

I’m a computer forensic examiner for a big tech company. If you correctly DBAN a drive (follow the directions!), whatever data may have been on it is gone for good. There is no way for me to recover it. I don’t think DBAN works on SSDs, but there are similar tools that do.

I guess I can’t rule out the possibility that the NSA has some super duper quantum warp device that can recover data from properly wiped drives, but no method of doing so has ever been publicly demonstrated. And, really, if you’re worried about the NSA or FBI, you have bigger problems than a hard drive.

Don’t futz around with guessing how hard you need to hit it. Just wipe it.

13

Maybe you missed the part where he said the drive was dead.

14

Thanks for all the replies, and even though this drive was dead I appreciate knowing about DBAN–useful if I ever sell or donate an old but working computer.

15

Drilling a hold through a hard drive is very effective as well.

16

In the future, why not encrypt the hard drive? Even if it dies, and someone finds and revives it, it’ll still be encrypted. You’re also protected from someone physically stealing the computer.

17

I remove the HD from computers before we dispose of them. Got a stack in my office, and I buy cases for them and use them as backup drives.

18

Well there’s dead, and there’s mostly dead. In my experience, a hard drive can be dead enough not to be usable in a computer, but not so dead that it can’t be wiped using a tool like DBAN.

19

Yep.

20

If old disk drives are tossed in the open ocean, will they float or sink? Maybe a bunch of old dead disk drives could be put to good use to weigh down dead corpses that one throws in the ocean