How to Destroy a Hard Drive and Data

[bellarmine33]

Gotta hand it to you, ingenious! You could just take the cover right off, that'd make sure there'd be no air bubbles, and then you could watch the rust progress over the 2 weeks....:^) Fun!

[safranek115]

Personally I prefer the tesla method. A few hundred thousand volts can turn a disk in an HDD into plastic.

[chrisgrinhard]

THANKS!

[MirandaSour]

cp.

[sonicfuker]

I don't know about that shotgun not doing the job story of yours.

[manzo47]

Just grab a sledge hammer and whack it a couple of times.

And your info is safe. :)

[ferdo621]

the two best ways to destroy such a drive is to simply smash the platter. The MOST effective way is to microwave it but well I just don't want to try that lol.

[skodakiass]

i prefer semtex

[tehdudester]

What if you boiled it.

[lennyf1957]

how in hell is ordinary table salt going to ruin a freekin’ plastic bucket?

[julienne910]

i hit mine with a hammer after riping it open then smashing the disk

[1MtnBoy]

Old School it 007

Very good video ! A framing hammer is a simpler & guaranteed method to destroy data. and a lot more satisfying though, lol.

Put the HDD in a zip lock baggie and shatter the platters... completely, Mince.

I would love to use a 12 gauge too but folks here don't think too kindly of bringing glass, trash & junk from home to the ranges for target practice, too bad too it would be fun, pain to clean up but fun ! "This PC aint big enough for the 2 of us"....BLAM ! ... BLAM ! BLAM !

[yesiamanalien]

If you have the time and the drive works.. DBAN ISO. Another way if make some thermite, coat the drive in it and set it off. Another is melt the drive in a metal melting furnace or run it through an industrial shredder.

[thecreativewebshow]

why dont you just open the harddrive and smash the disk with a hammer. ... so much simpler..

[negatiff54]

фигня. пластины даже кислотой не уничтожаются. можете попробовать. нужнен органический растворитель или физически повредить пластины

[Wag3x]

ok, so if you shot it with a shotgun id love some one to take the time to put the aluminum disks together and get the data from them lol.

[TheKalapacsos]

pointless... overwrite data and done

[ProModeArena]

Pedobear HD or what?

[nastorrian]

Take a bucket you dont care about much... Gee, I have to many buckets i truly care for......

[cameraman4brainiac]

sledge hammer!

[funnybee2]

...or you can throw it on the ground a few times.

[BlueFoxTV]

You can still get data of this disk.You need to wipe the disk magnetically with a bulk tape eraser. OR remove the paters and microwave them.

[Electrodudeify]

The safest way to destroy a hard drive is to open the top and break the disk into a million pieces with a hammer, smash it till it turns to dust and throw the rest out.

[Rethic]

Using thermite is my prefered way.

[scary00001]

i just burn it completely, mission accomplished... Petrol + Hard drive + matches = instant data deletion 100%

[bjnoob]

or smash it with a hammer



[skcool1555]

you know in IT class they teach you to Take a hammer and hit the platter becaue under that metal coat is straight glass then you throw the drive away

[Streetfightz583]

Want to destroy anything? burn it.

[MRwtfish]

Stick it in a microwave, turn it on for 999 hours and vacate the room. Then after your house has finished burning down take the microwave (or what's left of it) and take a drive to the coast. At the coast then proceed to stomp on it a bit and then throw it into the sea. Done!

[volidol]

не проще ли его разобрать?

[camronfritz]

1. Open

2. Fire

3. ???

4. Profit.

And that's the way the cookie crumbles...

[SouthernRiprey]

Just blend the damn thing. Worse come to worse, KILL IT WITH FIRE.

[MrCGangsta]

child pornographic makes u paranoid...

[mrfuzzer1]

If you just wanna destroy it just take out the discs and put them in a blender. No way anyone are reading those discs, i mean the discs inside the harddrive. Or you could use a strong magnet.

[GamePlayNHD]

too bad you van still get things off of it again....not sure who's it was but officials say they have found a very important hard drive down at the bottom of the sea and are in the process of getting it fixed up i think it was someone old and famous not sure...but trust me this will not work at all unless someone is Really determined to get it working

[brainstormnl]

hammertime.

just pancake it with a hammer

[NewBoyz0624]

LOL Take a hammer.. and crushed it into pieces

and you're Done!!!

[rminb010204]

I drop the platters in my BlendTec Blender®!

Platter dust, don't breathe it!

[dourabbawinner]

I just take mine apart remove the platters and then twist the shit out of the platter then chuck it in a fire for awhile. good luck to anyone getting their hands on it.

[WakeMyBow]

u need to see distruction. not salty water.. LOL! and u took 2weeks?

use a hammer/drill and u will be done in mins. WITH LOTS OF FUN!

[StonerCave]

Kill it with fire and bury that bitch in the woods somewhere far away from your house.

Profit...

[nothungryforpizza]

that or fire

[nothungryforpizza]

theres always dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx not foolproof but usually near enough

[Engineer9736]

@nothungryforpizza that does exactly the same as just a full format, except not putting a file system on there. Sounding like a smart guy doesn't always mean you're a smart guy.

The guy in the video sounds desperate for killing his hard drive. There's got to be something real good on there.

[Catalyph]

you could have not spent the time prying with the knife, just take the extra four screws out and then with a piece of sand paper scrubbed the plates.

that would take a whole 4 minutes...

[DellPrecisionM60]

Ever heard of DBAN? Run a triple wipe and good luck getting stuff off of that. Oh, and that also enables you to be able to reuse the drive in the future

[HappyFoxIsHappy]

Quick formats are not safe. Full formats, especially ones that write 0's over existing data, are safe. This of course only works if your HDD works.

[Harleyman440]

only way to desroy a hard drive is to take a cutting torch to it

[Turbolad995]

I wonder if scrubbing a hard drive's metal platters with chlorine bleach, water and an abrasive scourer would do the trick?

Does DBAN work or is it just "snake oil" for this purpose and only useful to use before installing Windows and/or Ubuntu?

[themine1122]

you can do this, but the bestest way is to throw it in gasoline instead!

[powerChriZ]

just open it up, put some sand inside, close it and turn it on (of motor's still working)

after that put it into salted water for some days

and then take a metal-saw and cut it into two pieces

i think that should be secure enough :D

[crocodile2006]

God this guy is fucking stupid.

All you need to do is remove the drive from plastic surround and smash the top with a hammer and a screwdriver.

Platters inside shatter and turn into dust. Data gone forever. No silly pull it apart, put it in water with salt nonesense required

[nonooby]

Or just smash it with a slegehammer until the disk is broken :D

[hawkwreak]

Best way to destroy data on a hard drive. Either Gauss the drive (Fully magnetise it) Shred the hard drive making the plate completely destroyed. Hard drives are difficult to remove data from On purpose. But with enough effort, Its quite easy.

Source: Comptia A+ Certified Technician

[nuclear1250]

or alternatively, take a hammer to the fucker >:D

[SPLITSECONDproduct]

......now....mother will never know what kind of..porn i had on mine....>:D

[dwdallam]

Why not just take the top off and take a acetylene torch to the platter until it melts? Takes about 10 minutes. If the corrosion destroys the platter to a point the data is also destroyed, then your method will also work. However, a torch is faster.

[stdavross666]

soak for a week...what in idiot

[stdavross666]

all that fucking around, just smash it dickhead

[jhayem12]

why not just get a sledge hammer and smash it. and that will make it unrecoverable in a minute? instead of waiting for a long time to get it all rusted. somehow what i do to my old harddrive I dismantle it and take the disk out and I made a kind of chandelier. lol

[the731272]

pfft i can destroy a maxtor by letting it perform normally

[HakimBej]

That won't deleat any thing you must erease files with programs.

[steve603z]

That does not work, I've recovered data from hard drives that had sat underwater for 3 months. I'm not a hard drive recovery expert, when I got the drives, they were full of dirty water, I opened the cases, rinsed the drives under distilled water, let them dry. Replaced the drive electronics, and was able to image the drives with DD-Rescue. Most drive parts don't rust. The best easy way to kill a hard drive is simply bend the platters. I use'em for target practice.

[dragasoni]

@steve603z You can recover data from a rusted and corroded plate? I highly doubt it, I'd love to see proof of this.

Regardless, I think it would be easier to recover from bent plates rather than rusted and corroded ones. And you're wrong, many of the parts inside turned to rust and the plates were rough to the feel and full of corrosion.

[steve603z]

@dragasoni Well, I guess thats what you get for buying a Maxtor drive. The platters are typically made of aluminum, glass, or ceramic. The are not supposed to rust. If you bend the platters, it will be almost impossible to make them perfectly flat again so the drive head can float over the platters again. However, it's interesting to note that early hard drives used an iron oxide magnetic media. At Google, step one in hard drive destruction is bend the platters, then they shred them.

[IILaryII]

@dragasoni

The Platens dont rust. The main platematerial has a carbon overcoat.

The "rough" feeling is the crystalized salt on top.

As long as the plates are okay, you can recover the data. Even if the plates are partly damaged, one can recover the data

[OYA12940]

@dragasoni platters dont rust they have a glass coating

[cammy1568]

@dragasoni Just to let you know, the plates are made of glass, so they will NOT rust. When you bend them, they also smash like glass.

[ElectroHouseTunez]

@dragasoni but does rust manipulate the magnetical characteristics of the disk? if it does not, you actually CAN recover at least SOME data.

[FreezingwindDOTcom]

@dragasoni I know this is an old post, but what about the magnet technique? Taking a strong magnet and running it across the hard drive, maybe this myth has been busted, and probably just scrambles data rather than making it completely unreadable.

[akzeo]

@steve603z i am a hard drive expert i help making them. and no way u can do that!!!

[thecooldude9999]

you format it 15 times (or more) and the data is lost

[dragasoni]

@thecooldude9999 That's a common myth. Formatting doesn't truyly erase data.

[thecooldude9999]

@dragasoni how about degaussing it?

[GermanyIsAwes0me]

@dragasoni Only if you "quick" format will the data be intact. P.S. A 12ga shell is gonna do about 1000 times better than some salt water, just sayin

[steve603z]

@dragasoni It is true that "Formatting" does not erase, because formatting only modifies the partition table. If you overwrite every bit on the drive with random data ONCE, it's almost impossible to recover. Many many years ago, it was possible to recover data with special equiptment, even after a random data pass. However, today, bit density is so high, after one random pass, it's pretty much impossible to get data off.

[myyahoo123456]

@dragasoni Low level format? Or zero fill ?

[UltimatePwnageNL]

@dragasoni .... bull fking shit, dude. if you set and reset a bit in a random pattern you wont know what the original bit was. formatting puts a bit to 0, and residual magnetism remains so if it was 1 you would know. if you put all bits to one a lot (and back) they'll all have random residual magnetism.

AND you will be able to re-use the drive! =D yay!

wanna permanently 100% sure destroy all data AND the disk? grind the platters to dust and flush it through the toilet. fastest way.

[Janigut]

@dragasoni

What about writing it full and erasing is 10 times?

I would do it the easy way: Get a plasma cutter and it's done.

[RussianFoxProduction]

@dragasoni That is why you do a low-level format on the drive and then use a custom made program loaded onto a boot-able floppy to write a full checker board pattern on the drive, a full positive pattern, a full negative pattern, another checker board and then finally low level format it again. Then you can resell the hard drive without any fear of having your data recovered.

[EklekTek1]

i can still get files off that...

[dragasoni]

@EklekTek1 Prove it.

[blowupuate13]

Does fire work??? I LIKE FIRE!!!

[c0rrupts3ct0r555]

lol thats a maxtor. they dont need help destorying the data, they are perfectly capable of taking the data with them when they fail.

[dragasoni]

@c0rrupts3ct0r555 This is true, Maxtor drives don't seem to hold up all that long. Western Digital are better, but they seem prone to premature failure too.

I prefer Seagate hard drives over all other brands. Also, the older IDM Deskstar drives were very reliable.

[c0rrupts3ct0r555]

@dragasoni LOL the deathstars? google 75 and 60 GXP.. all failed because of the stupid glass platter bs and gmr heads. every one of those deskstars i've had has failed. a few of them are in my profile. IBM got sued for bad drive quality and gave out everyone 100$ per drive. Massive failure rates. Never had a WDC fail on me EVER. Stay away from the "death" stars theres countless videos of them on here failing, and a few that have had head crash, scraping all teh data away.

[dragasoni]

@c0rrupts3ct0r555 Hmmm, well I bought a 120GB "deathstar" in 2001 which still works. In fact, it's the hard drive I used to replaced tha faulty Maxtor 200 GB in that caddy that's in this video! It still works great after 10 years. I used it in my server for about 5 years, then it sat in storage for 4 years, now I'm using it again.

It must be different from the GXP ones you mentioned.

[miguelsotoseudonimo]

Thanks for the info. But in other countries we don't just "simply throw the disc away" even after data destruction. You take these kind of items to a city "Green spot" or "clean spot" where you also take all other hazardous waste and domestic toxic materials.

[dragasoni]

@miguelsotoseudonimo There are no recycling programs in my area, everything goes in the trash. It's wasteful, but that's how it goes.

[dragasoni]

@hilololomoa You're welcome.

[bsaorders]

Drill holes through it .... especially the platter area. That will take care of anyone trying to recover the data. But for an extra measure, after drilling the holes place it in the bucket as shown. No one will get to that data!

[dragasoni]

@bsaorders If I had a drill, I would have done that too. Keep in mind the parts of the platters you don't drill through still contain data. So it's important to destroy the entire surface of each platter to ensure the data is not recoverable.

[uspimpclub]

real good info man ,,

[dragasoni]

@uspimpclub Thanks, I was hoping it would be helpful.