How to Say Goodbye to Old Hard Drives? 337
An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?
Drill it, sink it, forget it. (Score:4, Insightful)
A drill bit is cheaper and easier. It also avoids those awkward ricochets and overshoots that put holes in people. This makes it difficult for all but the most determined people to read.
Dropping it in salt water is a sure way to destroy the data but this takes longer.
As for buried date treasure, don't bother. If you did not find it when you put the drive down and have not missed it, you don't need it.
Enemy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hit the drives hard with a decent size hammer, a couple of times on each side, just so that anyone can plainly see that the drives are toast and totally useless as computer parts.
After the smashing, just toss 'em in a bucket. When the bucket fills up, take it down to your friendly neighborhood scrap yard. If you're lucky, they'll pay a "dirty aluminum" rate for it. If you're unlucky, they'll pay a miscellaneous scrap rate, which will be considerably lower (around a nickel per pound, here).
Or if you're really adventurous/thrifty, you can break them down into their different constituent metals (keep it simple and just sort into piles of aluminum, zinc, magnetic steel, and nonmagnetic stainless), which will maximize the amount of cash you'll be paid.
Honestly: Nobody wants to invest the time, effort, money, and energy into trying to scavenge data from a physically broken hard drive at the bottom of a scrap hopper without knowing, in advance, what is contained therein.
But if you're really paranoid, you can always yank the platters and melt them into little aluminum ingots first. It just doesn't seem worth the effort for household data . . .
In any event, you can be sure that the drives will, at some point, be recycled into something new.
Re:Easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking about lack of education (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because the iron-platinum compounds used in modern HDs have a very high curie-temperature doesnt mean that the tiny magnetic domains dont become superparamagnetic at a few 100C at most.
Otherwise, just erase them.
All this "we can real deleted files because of remanent magnetisation" is _CRAP_ . This was possible 15 years ago, when servos were misaligning over time.
And may 10 years ago, when bits were still sized in um. Nowadays, the spatial resolution of HD heads is in the same order of magnitude as magnetic force microscopy.
I know a scientist working with magnetic materials who is actually trying to use perpenticular recording HD heads in a scanning microscopy, just because the technique is so fast.
Reading even a non-deleted hd is a long, hard experience with MFMs. Take your second per byte. Deleted is just impossible (superparamagnetic limit again. If the domain is polarized in a way the drive reads 0, there is simply not enough magnetic moment left to form any kind of "1" near it thats not thermally fluctuating). Even if it _were_ possible, we would be talking about days per kbyte with expensive instruments. Even _finding_ a file could take months.
I always take them apart (Score:3, Insightful)
I take them apart to admire the incredible workmanship that goes into them; the mirror polished platters and the wonderfully light head mechanisms that float so incredibly close over them.
Hard disks may be mass produced and cheap, but the care and perfection that goes into them would set most jewelers to shame. They are really works of beauty.