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Question--
How effective is it to use a drill press to drill a couple of holes through a dead hard drive that may contain sensitive information. Many of us at work have stacks of them on our desks due to a bad batch of PCs :) Could information still be retrieved?
Comments?
Software wiping utilities are useless because the drives are physically defective. I know about degaussing but I'm interested in comparing this to drilling.
If you crack a platter close to the spindle.. It's all over but the screaming. A heavy hammer right in the middle of the disk and it would never come back. A disk would have to spin in complete revolutions in order for forensic software on it.
Blow torch.
I like to hit mine with a hammer to insure its total destruction. Seems to be really effective too.
you guys must have important, private info my pc is open for whatever
no secrets here
Like this:
https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
And that's after being overwritten with 0's.
:)
Hmm, had a bad day Vernon:D
Yep, yet another failing (or dead) Quantum. This one belonged to my wife. Fortunately I was able to retrieve 99.9% of the data before it gave up the ghost.
It started developing a 'bad spot' here and there a couple of weeks or so ago. Then a few days ago, when six new ones appeared in a single day, I knew it was on its last leg. (It was 4+ years old).
Anyway, she's up and running on a new Maxtor 80GB. Used Partition Magic's DriveCopy 4.0 to do the copying from one to the other. Worked like a champ.
BTW, I *-always-* physically destroy any hard drive that I replace, mine or a customer's. It takes less than a minute and it's not worth the risk not to do so. Besides, it makes me feel better. :)
ill have to keep it mind, luckily i have not had a reason absolutly destroy a drive, but once i do im give it a try, besides it sound fun:)
For sure, physical destruction like that is the only way to make sure that the data can never be recovered. Here's an interesting article:
Disk Sanitization
Thanks for the feedback. Yep these drives could potentially contain sensitive information (it's a government agency). Apparently at higher levels of sensitivity, the policy is that drives are destroyed and the pieces get locked up in a vault for 10+ years. Wow