We do "quite a bit" of secure destruction at one of my clients. The propane torch is the way it's done, and it's easily hot enough to melt aluminium alloy. Open the case with a hammer (for speed). If the discs have a glass substrate then the torch isn't that good but a tap with a hammer works. I've used a Bernzomatic in the past but the guys who do a lot of it use torch attached to a 13Kg cylinder of propane.
the only bit I worry about is the drive. The last security conference I was at someone had bought drives for sale in Nigeria at a market stall and they were being marketed as "contains Windows and much interesting data".
I remember buying my first hard drive for an A2000, it was a 42MB Seagate MFM encoded drive, 5.25" half height. It had an odd controller that consisted of a standard PC 8 bit ISA card, piggybacked onto a full length Zorro II card. IIRC the cost was pushing £400 all in at one of the computer shows in the Novotel.
In the end I did go for the Mapp gas approach and spent a happy half hour in the garden with a small brick hearth blasting away.
I didn't realise from the video that the metal actually melts but it certainly does. There are some quite pretty colours as well. Perhaps I could sell the results as art.
Thinking about the responses to this topic and the different ideas, I am wondering whether the chosen methods are a throwback to childhood and the classical elements of earth, water, wind and fire.
When I was a kid, I used to enjoy playing with water and liked to watch bonfires. I wasn't that interested in digging or flying kites.
Water wasn't really going to work for the destruction exercise, unless one stretches a point and considers acid.
Interacting with earth in the broadest sense often involves hitting it in some way, so I wonder whether those who suggested submitting the platters to a bashing liked digging etc. as kids.
Equally, I could be talking bollocks, but trick cyclists get paid a lot for this type of thing.
My mum used to work as a secretary for the Local Education Authority. Apparently the occasional session of hard drive bashing in the car park came under "other duties as assigned" - there was a hammer in the office for the purpose.
If you have an old drive which has an "SS" (Self Seek) jumper on it, you can just power the drive up with this in place and the heads will continually perform fast seeks in various patterns (which in some cases can be changed by setting other jumpers). This was used to demonstrate drives with clear covers at exhibitions. I have an old
100Mb SCSI disk which I've setup this way and fitted a clear plastic cover, and it gets dug out for demonstrations from time to time. Obviously, open the drive in as near to cleanroom conditions as you can, as this won't work if a head crashes.
Hmmm. Add a stylus to the head and it almost becomes an electromechanical Spirograph. That might satisfy James May and make the drive unreadable as a bonus.
Once upon a time I had a bug report that the machines weren't running the POST with the new memory. A visit to the factory was required to sort it out.
It turned out that SOP was to power the newly built machine up to check it started, turn it off again, disconnect it, carry it to the soak test rack, plug it all in, then turn it on.
The DRAM still held the little marker I put in it to show that POST had already started(1). Why did we bother with refresh cycles?
Andy
(1) Deliberately, "started" not "completed" so you could skip the POST if you really wanted to.
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