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LANGALIST

By Fred Langa

Following my recounting of decommissioning a failing hard drive, readers share their real-world tips on drive destruction.

If there’s a creative way to ensure that an old drive never gives up its secrets, it would appear AskWoody readers have tried it. But a nail gun?

My recent column on temporarily losing 5TB of data on a malfunctioning hard drive struck a chord with many readers — especially the part about how I destroyed the drive to ensure that its data could never be recovered. (See “‘Moving house is great fun,’ said no one ever,” AskWoody PLUS 2020-07-13.)

Subscriber Tony Gore’s perspective was well put:

Yes! You have to flip your mental setting from “Let no byte perish!” to “Nuke it from orbit.” Weird.

Tony might be the better person; I must confess to some warped pleasure when running a drill bit through a drive that’s eaten my data. “Bad drive! Bad drive! You deserve this!”

Tony’s solution?

And subscriber Bob Shrager described a similar approach — though with a significantly different power tool.

(I really hope Tony and Bob are wearing good face shields.)

Slots, holes, nail punctures, and similar kinds of major physical damage will ruin the drive’s mechanism and destroy some of the data. This is more than enough to prevent casual attempts at data recovery.

But it’s worth noting that data can still reside in the undamaged portions of the drive platters. With persistence and the right equipment, a sufficiently motivated snoop might still recover sensitive information.

For that reason, mechanically disabling a drive should be the final step in the drive-sanitizing process — employed after the drive has been thoroughly stripped of its data using techniques such as overwriting (Wikipedia info), degaussing (i.e., demagnetizing; Wikipedia info), or other means.

The combination of a thorough data wipe and severe mechanical damage will ensure that a drive’s contents are effectively gone … for good! (Want to know the experts’ recommendations? See the U.S. National Security Agency bulletin “Media Destruction Guidance.”)

Subscriber Geoff Hart’s note focused on the overwriting portion of disk sanitizing.

Ha! That’s a creative use of the tax code, for sure.

I’d heard of people pasting copies of movies or other very large files to completely fill drives that were failing but still somewhat operable. (If a drive won’t work at all, degaussing and physical destruction are the only remaining options.)

Indeed, overwriting an HDD’s original files with anything else — ones, zeros, or the contents of large junk files — will foil most routine data-recovery tools. It’s usually sufficient for consumer-level data-wiping purposes.

But for cases requiring a higher level of security, multiple overwrites with random ones and zeros make the old data much harder to recover, even with lab-quality forensic tools.

Destroying a drive or two doesn’t take much time or effort. But what if you manage dozens or hundreds of PCs, and the data on every machine’s drive must be 100 percent unrecoverable? That’s the task subscriber Bill Sampson faced.

For sure, Bill. A mechanical shredding service makes a lot of sense when you need to take a bunch of drives out of service.

These shredders are awesome! A completely intact drive goes into their maws … metal, glass, and plastic confetti come out (YouTube video).

Most urban centers have commercial data-destruction services. Use this Google search to see what’s available nearby: hard+drive+shredding+near+me.

Shredding costs vary widely. But as a general rule, figure on approximately USD $10 per drive for small quantities and somewhat less for larger orders. Additional services such as degaussing before shredding, providing certificates of destruction, picking up drives, mobile shredding, and so forth will typically cost a bit more.

When it comes to making data unrecoverable, turning a hard drive into a pile of degaussed confetti is about as thorough as it gets!

Fred Langa has been writing about tech — and, specifically, about personal computing — for as long as there have been PCs. And he is one of the founding members of the original Windows Secrets newsletter. Check out Langa.com for all of Fred’s current projects.

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