well, you could always go the ‘will it blend’ route.

put some tnt in the hdd and the ignite it.

I think you should just connect a larger battery to the hdd and if a special switch is pressed it offloads into the hdd and fries it.

My dad has this hard drive all shot up. Maybe I will take a picture and send it to you? Very effective!

put in a solenoid injected syringe of mercury. Should dissolve the surface of the platter and leave a nasty surprise for whoever you were trying to hide your data from, when they open it. Would say a glass vial which gets crushed by the solenoid for old school school style, but theres too much potential for loss if the drive ever gets dropped.

a ride in the washing machine with a brick for company

Only thing that will work is heating it up to the Cürie point (when the metal looses its magnetic abilities)

so fire up that oven

Epoxy wouldn’t do much good. It’d stop you running the HDD, but wouldn’t destroy the data. A forensic examiner could simply remove the platters and insert them into an identical drive and read the data off (barring iny drive-specific encryption, in which case some ship re-soldering would be required. In any case, the data is still in a readable state).

The only sure way. Only problem is that is stinks really bad.

http://web.mac.com/barrywoods/Site/DOD_drive_wipe.html

I’m thinking scrappy was probably right about piercing method, ie, if you can just punch a whole through the platters, the recovery would become too costly for all but the most valuable data. This could be done easily by sharpening the point of a small piston, fixing it to the top of the drive, and filling it with some gun powder.

Of course, the same idea could be implemented with thermite, since dab about the size of a penny would probably be enough to melt through the aluminum top and burn a hole through the platters. But not enough to burn through the rest of the drive and case.

Once nice thing about thermite is its cheap and commonly available.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Thermite-100-grams-Fe2O3_W0QQitemZ230206230007QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1267QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

You could light it either with a magnesium powder starter, or by mixing it with potasium permanganate (definitely misspelled) then adding glycerin, which will react with the potassium permanganate and spontaneously combust at high temperature, setting off the thermite.

If I have some time once my college apps are done, I may put together a video testing this out.

Also, about frying the drive with a battery, all that would be fried is the controller hardware, so the data could be recovered by replacing the controller or moving the platters to a new drive.

A while back I read that taking a nice electric drill with a large bit (quarter inch or larger), then just drill a few holes right through.

Otherwise, my dad has a really old “nail gun” that actually works like a gun. It has a gun powder-filled shell, but instead of a bullet, it fires a nail. The device is designed for nailing things into concrete, but I’m thinking it’d blast some nice holes right through the drive. Plus, it’s fun!

If you don’t have a lot of money, but you live in a high-rise. Hang your hard disk out the window, with nothing to hold onto it but the SATA cable. Then cover the hard disk with a protective lubricated condom, to keep the drive safe from rain and snow.

If anyone grabs for the hard disk, the SATA cable will disconnect, and the protective lubricated condom would make the drive too difficult to hold. Thus the drive will plummet 50 stories to it’s destruction.

Put some sand inside and let the drive spin. It will not be long until all magnetic material on working surfaces is dust. Good luck recovering data from *that*.

I would have to vote for simpler means of data destruction..

1. Immerse said drive in LN2.. drop (or smash against) and drive should be no more..

2. Drill a small hole and add about an 1/8th teaspoon of carbide dust (think diamond grit) and power up drive. You may be able to use one of the ‘covered’ vent holes (the ones that say ‘removal voids warranty’)

3. Usually a good physical impact of the drive (flat side) against a hard floor (ie. concrete) will provide enough force to render the drive un-readable (by conventional means). I’ve even heard of some drive platters shattering under this type of impact. (could probably build a machine to do this)

4. Place desired drive to be ‘destructed’ into a fire.. (outdoors and/or well ventilated) eventually the Al should melt (if hot enough) and the platters de-magnetize..

5. (this one’s not so simple, but it would be awesome) Perfom specialized high-impact projectile testing and record high-speed images. (why? Because it would be sweet.. http://www.cordin.com/images.html I’ve been in the lab listed first on that page. Good stuff)

6. Finally (I’m sure I’ll think of more later) why not just fill the drive with black powder and set it off with some good ‘ol cannon fuse? (similar to anvil blasting.. only I’m sure it’d be better.. might want a good shield for shrapnel)..

Use a powerful degausser – at its simplest, just a large coil of wire around a core connected to an AC source. This method effectively flip the bits hundreds of times a second. After a quick check it seems commercial variants that are NSA / DoD approved so they must be relatively effective against modern recovery techniques. The most effective version of this would be one where the coil had a letterbox shaped slot in the centre for the hard drive.

If hard drive companies wanted to introduce ‘self destructing’ hard drives they could simply design a physical kill switch on the controller board. When this is set to ‘destroy’ and power is applied, it automatically starts writing random data over the platters. The distinguishing feature of this process could be that the power applied to the coil on the heads would be much greater than usual – as much as they could dissipate continuously.

It is unlikely epoxy would be an effective deterrant – most epoxy resins can be softened / dissolved.

We had a bunch of drives left when we moved offices all full of name and address info, so we left 2 member of senior management with a center punch, a small funnel, a bottle of full fat coke and a UPS battery rigged up to a molex adapter. They sat there and quite happily made candy floss for a few hours.

i could take em to work w/ me at the steel mill and mix em in… 3k degrees, and they will be part of a new buick…

I just bought enough iron oxide and aluminum to make about 3 pounds of thermite, and I’ve got about ten sub-gig drives lying around.

Should make for a hell of an experiment.

If you destroy you HD be sure to the magnets out of it first. The ones where the base of the rw arm is are crazy strong. Its worth it destroying old drives just for the magnets.

You could just take low level control of the drive and magnetically wipe it down, off track and otherwise, then reformat for another use.

If you were really paranoid you could seal the drive and pump all of the air out of it, then rig a vial of liquid tritium to blow off inside should your stuff get seized.

I don’t think epoxy is a good idea, because that could potentially be dissolved and leave the platters intact. also, any idea dumping current into the drive controller simply fries that part, and doesn’t affect the platters either.

if you know they aren’t going to cut the power, maybe keep your drives on eSATA inside a microwave, which turns on either remotely or tied to a dead man switch or house alarm.

if you want a solution that works after they cut the power, mod the drives with dissolvable plugs or windows, and use solenoid mounts to hold the drives suspended over a bath of acid or other substance you know will eat the magnetic surface. if the power goes out, the drives drop into the acid bath.

How long does it take to erase a hard-drive the normal way? If the battery can last long enough you could power the hard drive and fill it with random data through IDE. Much less destructive or toxic, but not exactly a perfect method since you have to hope that the thief does not rip off the battery before the erasing is done.

I once set up a 1 GB hard drive in a linux server with some M80s wired to a model rocket engine starter that was triggered when a relay was tripped by a signal from the COM port. I had a simple shell script to take care of it. I ended up using it once. Quite interesting.

for my method just destroy the chip by massive power overload….

hydroflouric acid , injected.

will eat the platters, the drive mechanism and everything else on its way to the floor

I still think the idea of acid or something else that will destroy the drive is good. Just wire it up to a button on your PC or something, if someone you dont like (e.g. FBI or whoever) comes knocking, press the button and by the time they get to the drive, its an unreadable pile of goop or whatever.

Of course, then you get sent to pound me in the ass prison for “interfering with a federal investigation” or “illegal destruction of evidence” or some other such trumped-up charge.

The whole idea of hard drive destruction is lame. If the thing still works, format it over and over again with something like Boot And Nuke, then re-use the drive. If it’s completely shot, take out the platter, smash it or something, and use the rest of the components for something useful…or just build an HDD speaker or HDD clock out of the dead drive.

But if you absolutely must destroy (for you are crazy), then some explosives…or even just a sledgehammer…would do the trick.

well, just put current through the chip that does encryption on a whole disk encrypted drive…….fry the chip key, and no way that data is coming back……….

I saw this enclosure at Fry’s that encrypts data on the fly into the drive, just somehow fry the chip in the enclosure that stores the hash, and, boom, unrecoverable, unless someone can randomly get YOUR PARTICULAR HASH…

i would hack together an induction burner (magnetic hotplate) with the drive if they are in contact when the induction burner comes on it would degauss the whole Drive

Sorry for the cross post, but in case someone is interested I’ve done some testing of degaussing hard drives and found some interesting results. Essentially I found that you can count out hiding an electromagnet large enough to do damage inside your case for an auto-destruct.

http://www.packetsniffers.org/bitbucket/degaussing.html

I had some classes with a guy that got direct access to the drive heads and motor via software and forced the drive to spin at full speed while slamming the read/write head onto the disk. Funny thing is it would totally screw up the drive…he said one drive actually got so hot it caught fire.

At the DoD there are two approved methods. Four 1/4 inch holes through the platters, or several sweeps through the Gauss machine. Personally, I think a pic programmed to turn a battery powered electromagnet on and off as the drive spins. Thus pulling all the bits around on the drive, scrambling what was once legitimate data.

Hows about the good old Microwave, set it to very high throw some beans in there with some cheese aswell, and you have a nice fireword display and nice fried HDD and some lunch at the end of it ( warning Contents maby be hot ) you have seen what microwaves do to Cd’s so why not microwaves

I knew a guy who worked at a place that recovered data off of hard drives for a living. We’re talking 20-30 grand per dive in almost any condition. He said the only thing that prevented recovery was if the drive was soaked in bleach. Not much fun factor – but complete secure destruction of data.

Don’t forget the RAM when destroying your data, its the forensic back door to data recovery.

How about scrapping out a microwave for the magnetron and the needed parts, duck tape it to the drive and nuke your data. I don’t really know what that would do to a HD but it works great for cd/dvd disks

I do blacksmithing and have a homebuilt gas forge. I regularly heat up metal to non-magnetic state in it.

It’d be a simple matter to toss the drive into the forge and heat it up the the point of total data loss. This would also likely melt most of the non-metal components.

You could go even hotter, using a foundry set up and melt the casing down too. (lots of folks do backyard aluminum casting.)

The disc platter is a substrate material with a magnetic layer added above and below it, so running a coil of thin nicrome wire through the substrate, coated with a highly flammable material, and finally making the substrate of a material with low melting point, like a plastic should reduce the platters into a gloop in a few seconds :)

Although I like the idea of destroying things for the fun of it, this doesn’t seem worth the effort, if you are truely wanting to make the data on the hard-drive unattainable then one should target the entire platter surface. Remember that if you deep format a hard-drive the data can still be retrieved because the magnetic surfaces show traces of what was the ‘old’ state … you have to sweep of the hard drive a couple of times in order to remove these traces. Keeping that in mind, any destruction method should completely dissolve the layer of the platter that stores it…360 degrees of it =)

I guess the question is what quality do you want: every bit and byte gone or make is as hard as possible or both ;)

hmm also I wouldn’t trust encryption yet; quantum computing is around the corner and DARPA has great interest in this field as it can be used to factor large prime numbers at speeds magnitudes higher than any super computer available today; if you encrypt something now … will it still be uncrackable 20-30 years from now ?

lets just put this this way-check out my flamethrower instructable

What is that hammer / wrench thing called in the picture? I don’t know what it is but I needs me one of those.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

This is the best discussion thread on HAD in a long time.

When I was younger and into computer networking I had several methods set up to destroy a hard-drive quickly. I once attached a model rocket engine to the hard-drive, so that the flame would enter into the enclosure just above the SATA cables. I just used everything I bought at a hobby store; a rocket engine, the igniter, and controller. Eventually I had two rocket engines mounted in a metal case that my dad helped me weld to the hard-drive (I didn’t tell him what it was for).

Later on I got into explosives and packed thermite strips (in chewing gum paper) under the engine exhaust. It was my hope that the super hot rocket would indeed ignite it, but it was doubtful. I instead opened my hard-drive and inserted chewing gum strips of firework gun-powder, because I knew they would ignite and burn.

When I was about 16 and I tested my rocket-engine theory with a very old 4 gig hard-drive. The engines ignited just fine, and burnt a small hole in the metal casing and melted all the plastic near by, but the hard-drive disks themselves were hardly damaged. We then proceeded with stuffing it full of firecrackers to no avail. Explosives just blow the disks apart into large-than-you-think pieces, you actually need a steady chemical fire inside the hard-drive case to destroy the disks.

The magazine 2600 had a similar discussion in it a few years ago that’s worth reading. It talked about magnets, chemicals, and explosives to destroy HD’s.

I’ve spent the last few hours researching the best ways to do it, and the DoD has published many finds.

http://all.net/books/standards/remnants/standards.html

Gotta love google.

I found the magnet trick works on a hard drive as far as usability. I needed to get mine replaced after a brief run in with a rather large magnet. I am sure I may have been able to recover (some of) the data but if you apply a purposeful magnet on a hard drive your data will be safe.

i suggest using a timer-operated electromagnet (with the strength of a rare earth magnet) that is positioned in whatever the prime position is for wiping your hard drive. let’s say your base of operations is stormed by a swat team that a mole called in. you just hit the little red button under the desk, and in, say, 5 seconds, the electromagnet kicks on, wiping all your data in about 10 seconds or less.

Simplicity is usually the best option, like heating your hard-drive to maximum operating temperature. The thermal expansion of the surface would work as a physical “encryption” of the drive. Only at the same temperature you could read it, and nobody would remember heating the thing to recover data…

it ain’t automated but when i need to be absolutely sure.

Wow – A lot of folks can’t read instructions – He’s looking for an *automated* means of drive destruction.

I think, if you wanted to completely destroy the drive when the machine was disconnected, I’d wire a linear shaped charge to a lithium battery and solenoid that’s held open by either/or the power LED feed or a Power-Over-Ethernet feed. When both are off, the solenoid closes and sets off the shaped charge.

I’d recommend that you experiment with the charge to Get It Right: Too little, and The Bad Guys Have Your Stuff. Too much, and you killed somebody – videos of successful tests will probably come in handy when you’re standing trial for killing a FBI agent “By misadventure” or whatever.

Crushing.

definitely crushing.