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  #1  
Old 11-14-2018, 9:36 AM
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Default Shooting At Computer Hard Drives

I have had several old desktop computers languishing in my closet for years. One was so old it had Windows 95 in it. Finally my wife wanted rid of them because they were taking up too much space. I didn't want to toss them for fear someone could take the hard drive out and retrieve the information. So I took them out on the patio, pulled them apart, and removed the hard drives.

The other day I took them to the range, along with my Ruger Model 77 Stainless in .30-06. I set them out on a berm at 75 yards, and had at them. The results were all similar to this one. These things are really tough! They're made from a very heavy cast Aluminum housing. The Western Digital models like the one in the photos seem to be the toughest. But the 168 Gr. Sierra Matchking sailed right through, no problem.

The first shot hit just to the left of center, right under the bar code. The next one nicked the edge, but as you can see in the other photo, it blew the whole upper left corner of the housing completely off, exposing the platter and arm. It landed on edge, so I put one edgewise into the right side, and that pretty much finished it off. That last shot blew the unit right over the top of the berm, and I found it about 30 feet on the other side of the berm itself.

The other hard drives all met with a similar fate. It was fun to be able to shoot at something other than paper all the time. And I doubt that anyone will be extracting any information off of them now!









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  #2  
Old 11-14-2018, 9:54 AM
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I tear mine apart and save the magnets. The plates are fun for the grandkids to play with, and make great signal mirrors.
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Old 11-14-2018, 10:04 AM
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I tear mine apart and save the magnets. The plates are fun for the grandkids to play with, and make great signal mirrors.
^This is what I do with mine too.
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Old 11-14-2018, 10:18 AM
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Part of our I.T. department policy is to destroy old hard drives. I wait till I have a box full and I take a .45 to each and every one. I used to take magnets out but I have way too many of them now.
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Old 11-14-2018, 10:23 AM
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Way back when I used to service some old hard drives that used 14" platters. They were great fun to stick into the ground and shot at. Hit them right and they would flip up into the air. The trick was keeping them up. We'd stick them into a soft bank of a creek and then shoot down at them. Made keeping them up doable.
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Old 11-14-2018, 10:31 AM
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Many years ago we took a large (think console), multi-platter hard drive unit out behind the building and shot it with buckshot. It later appeared in an advertisement for a competitive drive maker. The thing deserved everything we gave it and we never bought any more from them.

There are so many products today that deserve the same fate.
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Old 11-14-2018, 11:23 AM
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I tear mine apart and save the magnets. The plates are fun for the grandkids to play with, and make great signal mirrors.
Haha same here. Those magnets are powerful stuff.
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Old 11-14-2018, 12:08 PM
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But...but...is there something newer than Windows 95?
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Old 11-14-2018, 12:59 PM
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But...but...is there something newer than Windows 95?
Nah. Its just marketing.
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  #10  
Old 11-14-2018, 2:27 PM
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If you want to make the data unreadable, simply take the bare drive in your hand and slap it down multiple times onto a hard, flat surface. A formica countertop or cement floor works. Kind of like the drive doing a belly flop on impact. That causes the platters to all crash into each other with thousands of fractures. Pretty much a worst case scenario for anyone doing data recovery.

I was told this method by a specialist who worked doing data recovery for US intelligence, FBI and US Postal Service. Spies, crooks and pedophiles were the targets.

Burning (unless totally complete), shooting, even cutting up the drives isn't as thorough a means of destruction. Data recovery can still be done manually. Not fun but many a criminal is behind bars because someone in data recovery did the job longhand.
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  #11  
Old 11-14-2018, 2:39 PM
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If you want to make the data unreadable, simply take the bare drive in your hand and slap it down multiple times onto a hard, flat surface. A formica countertop or cement floor works. Kind of like the drive doing a belly flop on impact. That causes the platters to all crash into each other with thousands of fractures. Pretty much a worst case scenario for anyone doing data recovery.

I was told this method by a specialist who worked doing data recovery for US intelligence, FBI and US Postal Service. Spies, crooks and pedophiles were the targets.

Burning (unless totally complete), shooting, even cutting up the drives isn't as thorough a means of destruction. Data recovery can still be done manually. Not fun but many a criminal is behind bars because someone in data recovery did the job longhand.
The "platters" I removed from the multitudes of hard-drives I have torn apart had at least 4 steel disks inside that even when ground into the ground with a boot heel came up unscathed. Not sure about "fractures" by just hitting the drive on the concrete. And a bullet hole through the disks would make the data pretty much unreadable except maybe by the FBI, maybe.
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Old 11-14-2018, 2:39 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rivers View Post
If you want to make the data unreadable, simply take the bare drive in your hand and slap it down multiple times onto a hard, flat surface. A formica countertop or cement floor works. Kind of like the drive doing a belly flop on impact. That causes the platters to all crash into each other with thousands of fractures. Pretty much a worst case scenario for anyone doing data recovery.

I was told this method by a specialist who worked doing data recovery for US intelligence, FBI and US Postal Service. Spies, crooks and pedophiles were the targets.

Burning (unless totally complete), shooting, even cutting up the drives isn't as thorough a means of destruction. Data recovery can still be done manually. Not fun but many a criminal is behind bars because someone in data recovery did the job longhand.
wouldn't microwave be just as fast instead of slamming onto the ground like a giant slammer?
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  #13  
Old 11-14-2018, 4:23 PM
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Glad you guys physically destroy your hard drives, many people think formatting disk drives deletes the data. My company has a data recovery department, we showed one of our clients a test where we formatted the hard drive two times and we got the data off the platter still. New Solid State drives are different, formatting is good to go.
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Last edited by ZombieLivesMatter; 11-14-2018 at 4:25 PM..
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  #14  
Old 11-14-2018, 4:40 PM
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I would have hoped your accuracy and groupings would have been better....just sayin’
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Old 11-14-2018, 5:00 PM
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What’s great fun too is shooting cd’s with a shotgun. Instant confetti and even better if they’re tossed in the air b
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Old 11-14-2018, 5:42 PM
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Anyone else thinking about the metal, plastic... that is left behind when these devices are shot up? CDs... really? This type of confetti is not a good thing, IMO

Back down from my soapbox now, carry on
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  #17  
Old 11-14-2018, 6:30 PM
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Anyone else thinking about the metal, plastic... that is left behind when these devices are shot up? CDs... really? This type of confetti is not a good thing, IMO
Thank you for bringing this up.
Too many shooters are slobs and litterbugs.
One is too many.
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  #18  
Old 11-14-2018, 7:31 PM
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Hah, windows 95. Good times playing original mine sweeper and Jezzball
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  #19  
Old 11-14-2018, 8:30 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rivers View Post
If you want to make the data unreadable, simply take the bare drive in your hand and slap it down multiple times onto a hard, flat surface. A formica countertop or cement floor works. Kind of like the drive doing a belly flop on impact. That causes the platters to all crash into each other with thousands of fractures. Pretty much a worst case scenario for anyone doing data recovery.

I was told this method by a specialist who worked doing data recovery for US intelligence, FBI and US Postal Service. Spies, crooks and pedophiles were the targets.

Burning (unless totally complete), shooting, even cutting up the drives isn't as thorough a means of destruction. Data recovery can still be done manually. Not fun but many a criminal is behind bars because someone in data recovery did the job longhand.
yeah, that is completely wrong dude. i would be wary of the guy who told you that as they are lying about what they do. what he's talking about is the coating of a platter which is built to store magnetism. the magnetism is basically north and south, ie 0 and 1. this coating is adhered to the platter which allows it to store data. a slap or two on the ground will not destroy this coating. a basic consumer grade hard drive is built to withstand dropping and the only thing that would break free inside would be the arm. the platters are separated by aluminum washers and super powerful magnets, the platters which store the data would be perfectly fine.

modern drive platters are extremely robust and data recovery experts can literally perform miracles today. i have seen these guys pull data from burned out drives, literally burned and the platters had scorch marks.

DoD (department of defense) and NIST put out this guide:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/sp...p.800-88r1.pdf

my servers, workstations and datacenters are fedRAMP compliant as well which means i have to live by NIST standards and they were the ones who told the NSA and DoD what to do.

basically the process is to wipe the drive using NIST standard tools, degauss, punch the platters (put holes through it which will also shatter the coating) and then have the platters, memory chips, board and control arm shredded. after shredding, the particles are supposed to be 5-10mm2 optimally.

i get billed about $20 bucks a drive by a company for this process as my auditors require certificates of destruction and i need to personally witness the destruction of the drives meaning i either go to them with the drives or they come to me.

Last edited by NYT; 11-14-2018 at 8:32 PM..
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  #20  
Old 11-14-2018, 9:26 PM
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I just wipe them
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  #21  
Old 11-14-2018, 9:51 PM
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Originally Posted by ZombieLivesMatter View Post
Glad you guys physically destroy your hard drives, many people think formatting disk drives deletes the data. My company has a data recovery department, we showed one of our clients a test where we formatted the hard drive two times and we got the data off the platter still. New Solid State drives are different, formatting is good to go.
I saw a program where they interviewed a guy who worked for a large police department in the Computer Forensics Lab. He said those, "hard drive formatting programs" were totally worthless. Something about how they put all zeros or one's on the platter. He said there are many people in prison today who will testify to just how poorly they work.

He said the only way you can erase a hard drive for certain, is to place it on a rock and smash it into pieces with a sledge hammer. In this case bullets at high velocity was less strenuous, and a lot more fun.
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Old 11-14-2018, 9:55 PM
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Originally Posted by RustyIron View Post
Too many shooters are slobs and litterbugs.
And too many are mother hens as well. Unless you catch someone in the act, or else know for certain someone is not cleaning up after themselves, this type of accusatory b!tching and moaning gets real old, real fast.
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Old 11-14-2018, 10:22 PM
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I just wipe them
Like with a cloth or something?

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Old 11-15-2018, 6:05 AM
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8# sledge hammer works just fine for me!
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Old 11-15-2018, 8:47 AM
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i throw mine into the nearest volcano.

can't data recovery molten metal and plastic!
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Old 11-15-2018, 10:20 AM
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Our IT section had a "NUKE" machine, we all had to be trained to just turn it on.
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Old 11-15-2018, 10:21 AM
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And too many are mother hens as well. Unless you catch someone in the act, or else know for certain someone is not cleaning up after themselves, this type of accusatory b!tching and moaning gets real old, real fast.
Agreed.


I guess these dont make good armor.
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Old 11-15-2018, 10:39 AM
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12ga slugs make short work of HDDs.
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Old 11-15-2018, 1:13 PM
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Our IT section had a "NUKE" machine, we all had to be trained to just turn it on.
yeah its prob a degausser, a good one will run you around $10k.
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Old 11-17-2018, 2:38 AM
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The "platters" I removed from the multitudes of hard-drives I have torn apart had at least 4 steel disks inside that even when ground into the ground with a boot heel came up unscathed. Not sure about "fractures" by just hitting the drive on the concrete. And a bullet hole through the disks would make the data pretty much unreadable except maybe by the FBI, maybe.
I completely agree. Another thing I would not trust are these "programs" that supposedly erase all stored data, and replace it with, "binary zeros or one's". One does not have to be tech savvy to apply common sense to this situation. Computer programs add information to hard drives. What are you going to trust to be more effective at permanently removing the same said information? Another electronic computer program...... Or, bullets and sledge hammers?
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