What material is a PC's hard drive made of?

[am77494]

I love chemistry and the method I’ve used is very simple, cheap and hassle free.

Buy $1 drain opener (lye from dollar store) - buy $1 plastic bucket (or a large tupperware). Put the harddrive & the lye solution in the bucket - and leave it outside for a day or two. If it looks dry after a day - add a few cups of water. Since most of the hard drive is aluminum and the caustic is a catalyst, it will disintegrate to the reaction :

2Al + 3H2O —> Al2O3 (solid alumina) + 3H2

Yes it gives off hydrogen. It works faster if you open up the hard drive so the lye can reach the platters faster. Don’t worry, if you don’t have the time or the desire to open the case - the lye will eat through it anyways.

If you want it faster - use Muriatic acid from a hard ware store inplace of the lye above.

And none of the disk recovery guys will touch a drive that has gone through this.
Once done - put the bucket in a big trash bag and dispose off appropriately (do not mix this with other trash)

[beowulff]

@am77494

I love chemistry and the method I’ve used is very simple, cheap and hassle free.

Buy $1 drain opener (lye from dollar store) - buy $1 plastic bucket (or a large tupperware). Put the harddrive & the lye solution in the bucket - and leave it outside for a day or two. If it looks dry after a day - add a few cups of water. Since most of the hard drive is aluminum and the caustic is a catalyst, it will disintegrate to the reaction :

2Al + 3H2O —> Al2O3 (solid alumina) + 3H2

Yes it gives off hydrogen. It works faster if you open up the hard drive so the lye can reach the platters faster. Don’t worry, if you don’t have the time or the desire to open the case - the lye will eat through it anyways.

If you want it faster - use Muriatic acid from a hard ware store inplace of the lye above.

And none of the disk recovery guys will touch a drive that has gone through this.
Once done - put the bucket in a big trash bag and dispose off appropriately (do not mix this with other trash)

That’s ridiculous.

You are creating a big, corrosive mess, when a few whacks with a big hammer will do as well?

[Machine_Elf]

A couple of years ago our IT group need to physically destroy several dozen obsolete hard drives. They went to our machine shop, where the staff lined them up in a hydraulic ram that is normally used for bending 6-foot-wide pieces of metal up to 1/2-inch thick. they lined up maybe twenty hard drives at a time on the die, and then with a single keypress folded them all to a 90-degree angle.

[Leo_Bloom]

@am77494

I love chemistry and the method I’ve used is very simple, cheap and hassle free.

Buy $1 drain opener (lye from dollar store) - buy $1 plastic bucket (or a large tupperware). Put the harddrive & the lye solution in the bucket - and leave it outside for a day or two. If it looks dry after a day - add a few cups of water. Since most of the hard drive is aluminum and the caustic is a catalyst, it will disintegrate to the reaction :

2Al + 3H2O —> Al2O3 (solid alumina) + 3H2

Yes it gives off hydrogen. It works faster if you open up the hard drive so the lye can reach the platters faster. Don’t worry, if you don’t have the time or the desire to open the case - the lye will eat through it anyways.

If you want it faster - use Muriatic acid from a hard ware store inplace of the lye above.

And none of the disk recovery guys will touch a drive that has gone through this.
Once done - put the bucket in a big trash bag and dispose off appropriately (do not mix this with other trash)

Didn’t they use this all the time in Breaking Bad?

[Musicat]

@beowulff

You are creating a big, corrosive mess, when a few whacks with a big hammer will do as well?

Some paranoids just want to be sure. Very, very sure.

[am77494]

@beowulff

That’s ridiculous.

You are creating a big, corrosive mess, when a few whacks with a big hammer will do as well?

I do not own a big hammer and do not want to own one either. Things can break and hurt my eyes when breaking with a hammer. It can chip the concrete floor of my garage too. And my method - wont let even the FBI get the data out.

Big corrosive mess ? How am I doing that - that Lye is okay to be put in your drains and adding aluminum to it does not alter it. You don’t need a lot of Lye either - remember I said it was just a catalyst.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

[am77494]

@Leo_Bloom

Didn’t they use this all the time in Breaking Bad?

That was hydrogen fluoride - it dissolves bones. I wouldn’t get near that stuff even with proper PPE.

[beowulff]

@am77494

I do not own a big hammer and do not want to own one either. Things can break and hurt my eyes when breaking with a hammer. It can chip the concrete floor of my garage too. And my method - wont let even the FBI get the data out.

Big corrosive mess ? How am I doing that - that Lye is okay to be put in your drains and adding aluminum to it does not alter it. You don’t need a lot of Lye either - remember I said it was just a catalyst.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Because, you are not disposing of the lye down the drain, are you? You are throwing it in the trash, where it gets dumped into a truck, so that it can leak out with all the other liquid.

And I can absolutely guarantee that my method is cheaper… (of course I already own a hammer).