Shooting At Computer Hard Drives

[billt]

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!

[Notpc]

I tear mine apart and save the magnets. The plates are fun for the grandkids to play with, and make great signal mirrors.

[P5Ret]

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.

[Skip_Dog]

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.

[GreggieBoy]

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.

[Rodell]

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.

[frahuang]

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.

[Jess B. Guy]

But...but...is there something newer than Windows 95?

[DDM4556]

But...but...is there something newer than Windows 95?

Nah. Its just marketing.

[Rivers]

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.

[Notpc]

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.

[Scratch705]

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?

[ZombieLivesMatter]

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.

[Tarmy]

[Dragginpanda]

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