Ever tried to destroy a HDD?

[Mikey]

I've been trying to clean a lot of old shit from our garage lately, so that someday we might be able to park our cars in there. Yesterday I came upon a large box with a lot of old computer stuff. Piles of CD ROM discs with stuff like Windows 95 installation or TurboTax 2002, or old backup data. 3 1/2 inch floppy discs, and a huge pile of 5.25 inch floppies. I don't even have anything that will read that stuff anymore. But the big bonus was 10 old HDDs, going back to our first PC, which was a 1987 vintage AT clone with a 20 mb HDD. When we filled that up we added another 40 mb and thought that would last us forever. Of course DOS was limited to 640 of RAM and we didn't even have Windows back then.

I should have taken a picture of them before getting to work, but I didn't think about it. At first I just took an electric drill and drilled about half a dozen holes all the way through and thought that would be enough. But if you look online that's not good enough. You need to shred them, burn them, dissolve them in acid or maybe bury then, otherwise there are intrepid hackers who can still steal your data (not that anybody would want my 30 year old email backups). You at least need to scratch up the surfaces real well. So I decided I needed to go a little farther than just drilling. The old Seagate drives could actually be broken down with a screwdriver. But the newer ones are tough. The only plastic is the PC boards. The disc enclosures required a sledge hammer and a couple of steel wedges. Some of these took at least 10 or 12 full strength blows with a 2.5 lb sledge hammer just to open up a gap big enough to get the wedge in and wail some more. After an hour and a half or so, this is what I ended up with.







For good measure, I recovered the magnets from a couple of them and ran them over all the surfaces that I could. I'm not sure if I'm going to take them to the e-waste recyclers, or just bury them in the back yard.

[Roux]

After an hour and a half or so

That seems like a long time for not much progress

[Mikey]

Ten of them in 90 minutes? I don’t know it’s not too bad, considering I went through and drilled half a dozen holes through each before I decided I needed to eviscerate them. You really to wail on them with sledge hammer. The first couple of blows hardly even leave a dent.

[Roux]

10? Ok, I missed that at first.

[bungle clone]

webdog's threat to call the FBI on our Trolltrain invasions after Creednet was decades ago. Pretty sure there is a statute of limitations. And destroying evidence that you're a smack feeb is pointless, we already know.

[HighPlainsGrifter]

Is a Hillary Clinton reference too much to ask from you lazy fuks?

[Roux]

Nothing.

Your H Clinton reference is already there, as in nothing in this thread, and nothing after her 11+ hours of testimony. And she never refused to answer questions based upon her 5th Amendment constitutional right. Nothing.

Compare and contrast with ....... oh never mind, you're in the cult, logic and consistent reasoning don't mean anything to you.

[Mikey]

Is a Hillary Clinton reference too much to ask from you lazy fuks?

Can you say “lame?”

[Sven Golly]

Lame indeed.

There are always different rules for Democrats.

Different standards.

[88BuckeyeGrad]

There is a computer recycling station here in Lee County. I took some stuff up there a couple of years ago and asked how they process the stuff. They use a grinder. I asked if that was the best way, and the guy told me that the best way is to drill holes in the drive device and just put it in a Home Depot bucket filled with ocean water for a month before you take it to the processing center. Supposedly fucks it up permanently. I followed that advice. But there was no satisfying obvious corrosion or change evident. I really don’t care. My shit is boring.

[Mikey]

I may try that with a bucket of pool water. It’s only 1/10 the salinity of seawater but still might work.

Or I could dump some more salt in the bucket.

[88BuckeyeGrad]

Although I didn’t care enough for my own data, I Googled a bit to see if what I posted was legit. I would put it in the “very sketchy” category. I read articles of people finding their computers on the beach after a hurricane and using third party services to successfully recover data. Doesn’t sound very promising.

The best idea is probably to loan it to Smackie Chan. Once connected to his computer during Tune Town, it will experience a Chernobyl event. Elephant foot and all. Problem solved.

[Mikey]

There’s an area in our back yard where at least three cats are buried. There’s one more sitting here right now that’s skating on thin ice. I might turn it into a cat and computer memorial garden. Anybody digs that up I’ll be dead and gone anyway.

[kcdave]

For future reference- use an angle grinder with a cut off wheel-

https://www.harborfreight.com/7-amp-4-1 ... 60QAvD_BwE

You can have one open in about 30 seconds. Afterwards, I'd just burn
it in a fire pit.

[Mikey]

For future reference- use an angle grinder with a cut off wheel-

https://www.harborfreight.com/7-amp-4-1 ... 60QAvD_BwE

You can have one open in about 30 seconds. Afterwards, I'd just burn
it in a fire pit.

Thanks for the advice. I should be able to wreak all sorts of destruction with this guy.

[mvscal]

Your child porn collection is safe now...

[Mikey]

Your child porn collection is safe now...

The irony in this post is palpable.

[mvscal]

Says the libturd pedo desperately (and stupidly) attempting to destroy the evidence of his perversion.

[HighPlainsGrifter]

I've never considered the difficulty of destroying a disk drive. Probably because destroying a drive is incredibly simple. Just toss it in the luau pit, amirite?

[Mikey]

Good point. But you never know. Someone might try to consume it.