Shooting At Computer Hard Drives

[Toy4Rick]

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

[RustyIron]

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.

[fishnbeer]

Hah, windows 95. Good times playing original mine sweeper and Jezzball

[NYT]

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/specialpublications/nist.sp.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.

[MurdaJ]

I just wipe them

[billt]

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.

[billt]

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.

[Notpc]

I just wipe them

Like with a cloth or something?

[anyracoon]

8# sledge hammer works just fine for me!

[Scratch705]

i throw mine into the nearest volcano.

can't data recovery molten metal and plastic!

[buttfish]

Our IT section had a "NUKE" machine, we all had to be trained to just turn it on.

[PyroFox79]

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.

[Dirk Tungsten]

12ga slugs make short work of HDDs.

[NYT]

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.

[billt]

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?