Securely trash HDDs before disposal.

[#1]

Quote from: mcgurka

Now, I would imagine because of the inductive way im which Data on HDD's is written, the storage is magnetic, so.. go rip a magnet out of a loudspeaker, power amp it up, and put a huge bassy tune down it.

I remember seeing a magazine article about this. Even a professional degausser isn't up to the job.
Just possibly, you could try someone at CERN, where they use superconductors for their magnets and maybe it would erase your disk if you cycle through a few thousand cycles...
I wouldn't bet on it working, even so

[#2]

ok. One Word.
Thermite.

[#3]

Kinda makes it hard to sell em afterwards though.
I'll stick with dban for now unless there are sensible alternatives that might be better.

[#4]

OK, on a serious note, how about ERD commander, has a util in it called DiskWipe which erases disks to MOD standard I believe.
Scott

[#5]

Maybe someone should ask the government .. after all they wouldn't be careless with data and must have stringent security ... haaanngg on a minute ..

[#6]

Quote from: Alex

Maybe someone should ask the government ..

I understand they use TNT.
Chilly

[#7]

Quote from: chillypenguin

Quote from: Alex Maybe someone should ask the government .. I understand they use TNT. Chilly

lol

[#8]

Quote from: chillypenguin

Quote from: Alex Maybe someone should ask the government .. I understand they use TNT. Chilly

Or possibly sent to a "secure store" in Iowa by Pearson Driving Assessments.

[#9]

Thanks for reminding me axis - I was one of the people who took a test in the 3 years worth of data they lost!
Must ring that helpline..

[#10]

Rather than start a new thread - this caught my eye - securely wipe SD card
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19817921-SD-Cards-are-they-really-wipedmaybe-not

[#11]

Well...that made interesting reading.

[#12]

I once saw a program about Forensic Labs that specialise in recovering data from hard drives in criminal cases.
They were recovering data from disks that had been reformatted, overwritten with random data and burnt.
They were recovering from situations you would have thought totally impossible.
It left me wondering if there was any method apart from vaporising the disk that made it unreadable.

[#13]

Have to say. That after suggestions in this post that have varied from technical, through brutal mechanical destruction to radical (vaporisation) the answer would appear to be no! Presumably some anorak with a metal detector could find deeply buried HDD's, s'pose you could try chucking them over the side on a cross-channel ferry trip...but then global warming might eventually leave them high and dry (if you believe that particular piece of propaganda)

[#14]

What about taking them to PC world? They seem to like wiping hard drives unnecessarily...
Seriously, how about sending them back to the manufacturers. They do a low level format (normally for free) and if you send a whole batch and explain what you're doing with them, I'm sure they'd be happy to help.

[#15]

Quote from: Strat

I once saw a program about Forensic Labs that specialise in recovering data from hard drives in criminal cases. They were recovering data from disks that had been reformatted, overwritten with random data and burnt. They were recovering from situations you would have thought totally impossible. It left me wondering if there was any method apart from vaporising the disk that made it unreadable.

The people I had to use in the past were such specialists!
After a failure of a large RAID5 array they managed to recover almost all of the data.
It took one hell of a long time, and cost a large wedge of cash.
Their true specialism is recovering data from physically damaged disks.
If you think about the circumstances that may result in your HDDs being fire damaged, its pretty easy to see that as well as the physical damage, you also have to contend with the loss of the definitions of your arrays.
The main problems are the length of time for such a recovery, and the cost of the same.
Mostly its not really worthwhile going to such lengths, meaning that utilities such as those mentioned in this thread do render the data effectively unrecoverable (if a stranger had no idea what might be on the media, how much time/effort/money would it be worthwhile for them to spend on an off-chance?)
Its pretty hard to hid from the fact that its possible in many cases though, although with the increase of data density its becoming incrementally harder.