What to do with Hard Drives

[j44ke]

I find that I have accumulated a bunch of under-sized (as measured by today's data consumption rates) hard drives that are cluttering up the bottom of my desk drawers. These are hard drives no larger than 250gb, most of them LaCie drives in design-y cases. Unfortunately they are also a mix of plug-in and bus-powered drives, 3.5" and 2.5" size and who knows what the interfaces are. I think the spin speed is probably 5400 for all of them.

What the heck do I do with them. They were all used primarily as image storage or back-up of image storage, so the number of read/writes is pretty moderate. I feel like there should be a box I could put them into and make some sort of drive-spanned arrangement, but I have lost the use of that part of my brain or the technology has leapt beyond my comprehension and left me feeling a bit dunderheaded.

What to do?

[mmoore]

ninja discs.

[Shoogs]

FULL ON OFFICE SPACE FAX MACHINE

[NCC1701]

First I would run your strongest magnet over them.....

than I would drill many...many holes in each one. than smash it with a splitting maul!

That should do it

Hope this helps,

KJ

[dgaddis]

Take them to TT's BB7 Burning Party.

[false_aesthetic]

drill holes in the drive. 2 or 3 is ok. make sure to pierce the disc inside.
then send them to an e-waste recycler.

don't ask what happens to that stuff after it leaves your hands.

[j44ke]

I see. So is there a skeet launcher made for hard drives? I am trying to get my country gentleman thing going too.

[NYCfixie]

This!

Total destruction is the only way to protect your data:
Mobile Hard Drive Shredding and Destruction Manhattan New York

FULL ON OFFICE SPACE FAX MACHINE

[guido]

A hole drilled straight through and some water should introduce enough oxidation to make them unreadable by all but the most diligent recovery attempts. Then bring them to BestBuy, who will recycle them for you for a modest charge..

[Mabouya]

At work we either take them apart and sand-blast the memory disks clean, or we take them to a local smelter, where in the presence of our security person they toss them into the huge bucket of molten something or other.

[rec head]

Or wipe them and give them away.

Data Removal: Darik's Boot and Nuke - DBAN

[NYCfixie]

Or wipe them and give them away.

Data Removal: Darik's Boot and Nuke - DBAN

I wrote a paper regarding digital security for a grad school class and while investigating DBAN (a tool I really used to like), I came across this on their website:
"While DBAN is free to use, there’s no guarantee your data is completely sanitized across the entire drive. It cannot detect or erase SSDs..."

The only way to be 100% sure your data cannot be recovered is to destroy the drive.

For new laptops/desktops/tablets with internal SSDs, I suggest using encryption immediately and when you dispose the device tear it apart, remove the SSD, and destroy it.

[rec head]

I'm sure if you talked to the NSA they would tell you about piecing together busted platters and getting all the good data off drives with holes drilled in them. I doubt anyone would guarantee 100% that the data was gone but depending on what was on the drive I wouldn't worry too much. But my photos are all backed up in the cloud just waiting to get hacked anyway.

[j44ke]

At work we either take them apart and sand-blast the memory disks clean, or we take them to a local smelter, where in the presence of our security person they toss them into the huge bucket of molten something or other.

Yeah, the last time I got rid of some drives, I hit them with grinder.

Even though all this destructive creativity is fun, I was actually wondering if there was some sort of box, like (if you remember these from the way back machine) Drobo drive housings, where you could plug a bunch of dissimilar drives in and use them as storage equalling the sum of their capacities.

[NYCfixie]

Yeah, the last time I got rid of some drives, I hit them with grinder.

Even though all this destructive creativity is fun, I was actually wondering if there was some sort of box, like (if you remember these from the way back machine) Drobo drive housings, where you could plug a bunch of dissimilar drives in and use them as storage equalling the sum of their capacities.

The Drobo is awesome if you are trying to use smaller and/or older drives for backup and/or extra storage. You can usually use them in a mirror format (for redundancy) or striped (to create larger volumes than the underlying hard disks). It will depend on what the device supports. You can read more about RAID options to find out what works best for you.

[j44ke]

Huh, they are still in business? That's interesting. Thanks.

[xjoex]

You are not a high value target. Hit it with a sledge or drill a hole in it. No one is going to recover data from a physically damaged spinning disk or even SSD from a trash can. I have done chip off/dead bug forensics and it is a bitch. Half of security is being the harder target.

-Joe

[xjoex]

I wrote a paper regarding digital security for a grad school class and while investigating DBAN (a tool I really used to like), I came across this on their website:
"While DBAN is free to use, there’s no guarantee your data is completely sanitized across the entire drive. It cannot detect or erase SSDs..."

The only way to be 100% sure your data cannot be recovered is to destroy the drive.

For new laptops/desktops/tablets with internal SSDs, I suggest using encryption immediately and when you dispose the device tear it apart, remove the SSD, and destroy it.

NIST has some guidance on this : https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/sp...p.800-88r1.pdf

With many new laptops drives are just soldered directly to the board so removal is impractical if not impossible. One of the tools they recommend is hdparn. Worth a look if you are concerned.

Personally I just DD them for internal, or dd then smash with a small ledge if external/removable.

[j44ke]

Hmm Drobo plus my handful of drives would get me about 1.5Tb for $500 (or more.) That math isn’t working out so well.

I already have a sledge.

[Bewheels]

You are not a high value target. Hit it with a sledge or drill a hole in it. No one is going to recover data from a physically damaged spinning disk or even SSD from a trash can. I have done chip off/dead bug forensics and it is a bitch. Half of security is being the harder target.

-Joe

This^^^

Jorn - unless you are secretly the poet for a defense firm or a government agency, I wouldn’t worry about going too nuts.