Thickie hard drive question

Ralph-y

what did you have on them that its so inportant ??????

you all ready know that the NSA knows every thing that you said, read, looked, at !!!!!!!

Wipe them ... double wipe them and then see if a charity will use them for some third world country ..........

or just chuck them in a land fill with all the other rare earth metals :-(

Ralph:cool:

poppellerant

Going by this thread, you should use software to securely erase them (35 wipes for maximum security), smash them up, then burn them.

Surely all you need to do is undo the lid of the harddrive to expose the platters, then soak the harddrive in some of sort of chemical which will eat at the magnetic coating?

macman

Take the PC and drive along to PCW and ask them to 'fix it'. They'll then wipe the drive for you whether you ask them to or not...

Chickabiddybex

Stroke a cat. Wear a jumper. Brush your hair. Rub the hard drive on yourself.

(Static kills hard drives)

Truepat

Hillbilly2 wrote: »

If we remove the hard rive is that all personal information gone? We would be disposing via our local authority recycling centre so just want to be sure and don't want to smash it to pieces!

Do not forget to remove any media that may also be in CD, DVD, floppy, tape drives etc.

securityguy

There's an excellent bibliography of more recent papers here.

The tl;dr is that Gutmann's work was theoretical, related to very elderly disk technologies, the 35 passes were only because there were different passes for different technologies (ie, if you knew what sort of disk it was, you didn't need most of them), his work has never been practically validated, and in any case the difference between the "recovered" data and random noise would be at the edges of statistical difference. It's possible that had someone implemented his work seriously, they might have been able to (for example) distinguish between a wiped disk that contained nothing but English text and a wiped disk that contained nothing but German text, but that would have been at the outer edges of its capability.

One reason why disks are physically destroyed is because of concerns about how you validate that overwriting happened. It's not hard to sketch out malicious disk firmware which accepts large streams of zeros or ones, appears to write them to disk (and, indeed, will give you back the "correct" results if you attempt to read them back) but in fact doesn't significantly disturb the contents of the disk.

Of course, the best advice is to encrypt disks from the moment you start using them.

WTFH

Chickabiddybex wrote: »

Stroke a cat. Wear a jumper. Brush your hair. Rub the hard drive on yourself.

This is a family forum!

WTFH

I once wrote a lengthy description of how to safely destroy a hard disk which included firing depleted uranium shells at it.
But in reality, it's a question of what are you worried about someone finding, and what is the likelihood that a computer genius is going to go to the tip to find your old computer? If they really wanted to, they'd break into your house and steal it, while taking your bank cards, etc as well.

If you are paranoid about something happening, then rather than breaking the drive, then taking it to the dump in a plastic bag, a far simpler method would be to break the drive and put part of it in your bin, some in a public bin, and some at the tip. That way the person who is stalking you all the time and is going to reconstruct your drive will make it more obvious as she follows you around going through bins.

googler

Yet again, everyone wants to destroy a perfectly good HDD for no reason.

Yes, all your data is on the HDD. If you want to dispose of the PC, take the HDD out and KEEP IT. If the HDD doesn't leave your possession, your data is safe, and you can use the HDD in a USB caddy for other purposes.

bluesnake

googler wrote: »

Yet again, everyone wants to destroy a perfectly good HDD for no reason.

if your job and career, and your future career depend on it - did I mention mortgage and family, take no chances, do your due diligence no matter the cost.

Yeh, everyone wants to save money and be green, recycle, I too believe it is a good thing, however when you are left with the job - in the brown smelly stuff so to speak, the onus is on the person responsible - you. 99% of the time, most companies will find some member of staff to blame, rather admit management cost savings etc, or company policy if something goes awry.

I recently had to shred 95 new scsi 15k drives, among 150 duff ones. Just easier, and guaranteed no comeback. You can never be certain what is on a disk unless you have a few weeks/months to spare. Some of the disk may have been refurbished? Yes, it did hurt.
***********************************************
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust had been served with a Civil Monetary Penalty (CMP) of £325,000 for a number hard drives containing personal data, even though the company that they gave the drives too NHS approved third party.

http://www.ico.org.uk/news/latest_news/2012/nhs-trust-fined-325000-following-data-breach-affecting-thousands-of-patients-and-staff-01062012
http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/ico-issues-biggest-ever-fine-and-its-nhs-trust