How to Destroy old Mac hard drives to prevent data retrieval

[PGB1]

I'm with Patrick on the Save The Magnets comment.
John also mentioned the bearings which are indeed smooth and very useful for make-goofy-stuff people like me. I recently used some on a motorized, cable driven lifter-upperer thing I made for someone.
The tiny screws are handy, too. (My eyeglasses will attest to that.)

For the most recent platter type hard drives of mine, which would not run secure erase was out. I cut the platters into pieces and put part in one week's electronic recycling and part in the next week's.

For a SSD, other than secure erase, I don't have any idea that will make it safe and still keep it out of the landfill.

Some Non-Earth Friendly, But Fun Methods:
Where I worked, the task of hard drive wrecking came to our department (skilled trades) instead of the IT people, I suppose it was because we had all kinds of scary looking wreck stuff tools. We would take the magnets, bearings & tiny eyeglasses frame size screws out.
To "erase" the platters, depending on whether or not the IT people wanted to see the wreckage, the guys would pick something (After they snooped- It was amazing how many were not erased):

a) Wipe across them with microwave oven magnetron magnets from the appliance guys (a round concentrated field) I think now there are even stronger magnets available at the hardware store.

b) Cut & send the pieces to different compacting dumpsters (There were 6 on the dock)

c) Torch them or use the arc welder (outdoors- Phew! stinky)

d) Paper shredder that takes CDs

e) Garbage disposer

f) Cut-N-Flush

g) Give them to me. I'd put them in one of the high voltage transformer vaults for a day. We once checked one before and after. The EMF field made them unreadable.

Unfortunately, none of these recycle the platters. They all end up in landfills.

I've heard of microwaving or boiling them, but never tried it.

 

[pm-r]

Unfortunately, none of these recycle the platters. They all end up in landfills.

I've heard of microwaving or boiling them, but never tried it.

I've heard of a number of users who like to hang them and use them for rifle or pistol target practice. Not much left that's anywhere near readable if one is a half-decent shot.

Some just hang them in their fruit trees to help keep the pesky fruit-eating/damaging birds away.


- Patrick
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[chscag]

I've heard of a number of users who like to hang them and use them for rifle or pistol target practice. Not much left that's anywhere near readable if one is a half-decent shot.

Send them to Chicago.

 

[pm-r]

Send them to Chicago.

Does that mean that they need the shooting practice...???


- Patrick
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[sllewk]

Hi there, the best is a system called "SIT". applied liberally and physically to your old hard drive. Translation (if required) is--
"Sudden Impact Technology" using something like the good old fashioned Lump Hammer! It seems to work a treat.

Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

 

[techiesteve]

By the way, when I was employed by the US government doing computer repair at a large installation we first used a security wipe 10 times on old hard drives. After that they were sent to a depot where they were shredded.

Long ago I used to work for a company that was a manufacturers repair centre here in the UK. ICL had contracts with government departments. Before shipping failed 5.25" hard drives to us, for security they would neatly remove the platers. For us this involved a little extra cleanroom work, as the HDA was then contaminated, it was purged by nitrogen in the airlock before the platters were replaced and servo tracks rewritten. We were then warranty repair agents for Quantum, Rodime, NEC, Maxtor and others, mainly 5.25" and 8" hard drives in those days.

Currently we use a couple of Disk Jockey Pro Forensic Edition to clone drives, but very useful is its DOD erase function to securely erase hard drives.

As others have stated, the best option to destroy a hard drive is to lay it on concrete and pound it with a 4lb club hammer.

 

[Jonzjob]

I prefer toroidal core storage. At least I can repair it !

 

[Cr00zng]

If you had enabled whole drive encryption (i.e. FileVault) then you don't have to worry about destroying the drive, since the encrypted data is completely inaccessible without the password (you do use a strong password, right?)

Also, some hard drives use glass platters that can be broken just by dropping the drive from several feet or just throwing it on the ground. The best way to know is to just try it, since if it works you'll hear the bits of broken glass if you shake the drive. I've found it works better if you manage to get the drive to land flat on the ground, since that's the most vulnerable direction of the platters. In general it's pretty hard to degauss a hard drive without equipment specifically designed to do that. Strong magnets and CRT degaussing coils won't be strong enough to work.

Finally, if you can attach the drive to some other computer via an adapter, or even mount it in some other computer via the SATA connection you can use any of a number of drive wiping utilities to securely wipe the drive. One commonly recommended utility is "DBAN" ("Darik's Boot and Nuke"), which is a free bootable Linux that has a tool for performing a variety of data wiping passes. This can be a slow process depending on the size of the drive, but you don't really need to do that many passes of even just zero data, since the density of the data tracks on modern hard drives makes it extremely challenging to recover data even after a single pass of zeros. The generation of "random" data for the wipe passes is not the slow part of the process, however, so it generally doesn't hurt to enable that option. Three passes of random data is more than enough for the typical user's hard drive.

Again, this problem goes away if you enable whole drive encryption, so that's a good feature to enable going forward.

For most people, your method is more than sufficient for the average computer user.

That had been and is my preferred method of sanitizing disks. Just encrypt the drive with a third-party software, then reformat the drive. Since 2010, Intel introduced encryption co-processor (AES-NI) even software based encryption is fast. The chances are that FileVault 2.0 does utilize the AES-NI co-processor. Most recycling centers in my area do take hard drives, What happens to them, I don't really know.

Self Encrypting Drives (SED) are 4 - 5% faster, but also have exploits to bypass password authentication for decrypting the drive:

BitLocker on self-encrypted SSDs blown; Microsoft advises you switch to software protection

Reacting to a recently discovered security hole in hardware-based encryption in solid state drives, Microsoft recommends that if you’re using BitLocker to protect a solid-state drive, you switch from hardware to software encryption.

www.computerworld.com

MS not trusting SEDs says a lot about its encryption...

I disassemble some drives, after they had been sanitized, for the AL plates and hang them in the garden for keeping birds away. You should see the cats chasing the reflected sunlight on the neighbors house....

 

[Jim40]

Will using a magnetic degausser scramble the data contents of the platters? If yes, how strong of a degausser is needed? Will a super strong magnet work?

I just drill several holes in the area where the internal HD is Located