You're NOT going to recover any useful data from that. So I hear the FBI has people that sign to testify they took a drive "to the shop" and watched while someone opened it up and use a ?grinder? to literally shred the disk platters to dust. (OK, so it's possible, but is anyone REALLY going to use an electron microscope to detect drive platter slight head misalignments and recover the previous information from the misaligned tracks? For EACH track? *MY* data isn't that important.) Using BleachBit or DBAN or ( STOP throwing things at me!) just writing a bunch of 0s to the raw disk work just as well, if you want to reuse the drive w/o having any of the previous data leaked. (Or if the data is physically stored encrypted, they just erase the internal stored key.) That's if you TRUST them doing it, that is. SMART drives are supposed to have a self "secure erase" command, that erases the drive at hardware speeds. (Paste a picture of your boss or a favorite user on it if it'll help.) Platters with large gashes in them are hard to recover - plus it's fun, helps reduce stress. Get some cardio exercise while wielding a crowbar. Oh and if you do go the drill route, use a drill press or some other mounted and locked system. If true, that seems like overkill even for spooky spy shit. There was a likely apocryphal story that MI5 used to zero their drives, burn them, and store the ashes. In all cases, extreme physical damage should cover all your bases. ![]() Whatever was in there at the time the disk marked it bad may still be there. If the disk is doing over-provisioning to deal with exhausted sectors you should be aware that an OS level zero pass won’t touch any data in previously failed sectors. SSDs are a little different because of how they may be handling over-provisioning. That’s not meant as an insult, just a guess that if you were a big enough target, you would already have policy. Honestly probably nobody cares to go to the effort to extract the platters of a failed disk of yours, if you’re asking Reddit what to do for this. Worth noting that single pas of zeros is only useful for healthy drives. Single pass is fine if that’s what you’ve got. If you work out of a DC that happens to have a degausser you can make use of, that works too. The lazy/safe way for spinning media is to store them until you have a decent batch, the have Iron Mountain or your local equivalent destroy them. If you do a SECURE ERASE or ENHANCED SECURE ERASE, for all intents and purposes the data is history. A simple format, drive erase, or luksFormat will ensure the keys are gone, and the data is pretty much completely gone. With FDE encryption, one doesn't need to go to great lengths. The #1 thing that makes life a lot easier when it comes to drive erasing: FDE encryption. Took the platters out, laid them out on a table, added epoxy resin on top for a modern looking workbench. Gave them to a co-worker who had a high temperature crucible, and got ingots back. Put them in a pile, popped a thermite pack on top. Used hydraulic mauls, rams, press breaks, and such to bend drives into post-post-post-post-modern art sculptures.ĭropped them from a eight story parking garage. When I don't have to do a tap-dance to destroy drives, I have done the following: If a drive goes missing, and an audit happens, I can attest that I did the above two safeguards to ensure if the drive is around, data isn't available. They give me certificates of destruction and a video of the drives meeting their fate, and I reconcile that with the list of drives. I take the drive, hand it over to the guys with the data destruction truck. For SSDs, a quick couple seconds in the microwave (not enough to cause a fire, but enough to fry chips) is good enough. For modern helium drives, a vise and drill will ensure the data is not going to be recovered. ![]() but yet the drive label and serial number are intact. ![]() not completely, but enough to ensure the data will be hard to retrieve. I first nuke the drive via the OS, BIOS, disk utility, hdparm, or dd. When complance regs require me to destroy a drive:
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