A
Anthony Buckland
Flightless Bird
From time to time, we have threads relating to the
security-conscious destruction of data on a hard drive,
which has sometimes come down to "physically
destroy the recording media."
The one time I've actually personally done this, it was
on a 1995-vintage IBM machine. Breaking into the
drive to get at the disks was like breaking into a tank.
I feel that I could have left the drive, intact in its
housing, in the street for trucks to run over all day with
no effect other than making the housing dirty. I had
to grind off the heads of overly numerous screws with
my Dremel, since they were apparently designed to be
unscrewed only with some IBM proprietary tool.
I assume laptop drives are somewhat less nuclear-
hardened, or a laptop would weigh twice as much.
But I'm reading a suspense novel, in which a woman
on the good side tries to retrieve a laptop drive from a
man on the bad side, and as she forcefully drops him
to the sidewalk, "As he fell to the cobbles, [the drive]
flew through the air, shattering some feet away." The
disks prove to be uselessly damaged.
I would have thought that, excepting some unmentioned
damage to the recording surfaces, the destruction of
the housings wouldn't have been that catastrophic.
There are lots of housings in the world, and if you could
swap the disks and perform arcane synchronization
tasks, shouldn't it have been possible to retrieve the
data? If not, then all we would have to do to destroy
the data on a drive would be to break the housings.
This seems counterintuitive.
security-conscious destruction of data on a hard drive,
which has sometimes come down to "physically
destroy the recording media."
The one time I've actually personally done this, it was
on a 1995-vintage IBM machine. Breaking into the
drive to get at the disks was like breaking into a tank.
I feel that I could have left the drive, intact in its
housing, in the street for trucks to run over all day with
no effect other than making the housing dirty. I had
to grind off the heads of overly numerous screws with
my Dremel, since they were apparently designed to be
unscrewed only with some IBM proprietary tool.
I assume laptop drives are somewhat less nuclear-
hardened, or a laptop would weigh twice as much.
But I'm reading a suspense novel, in which a woman
on the good side tries to retrieve a laptop drive from a
man on the bad side, and as she forcefully drops him
to the sidewalk, "As he fell to the cobbles, [the drive]
flew through the air, shattering some feet away." The
disks prove to be uselessly damaged.
I would have thought that, excepting some unmentioned
damage to the recording surfaces, the destruction of
the housings wouldn't have been that catastrophic.
There are lots of housings in the world, and if you could
swap the disks and perform arcane synchronization
tasks, shouldn't it have been possible to retrieve the
data? If not, then all we would have to do to destroy
the data on a drive would be to break the housings.
This seems counterintuitive.