4 ms·
A friend of mine who was a military secure comms guy back in the 80s told me that if their position was about to be overrun the procedure was: 1) Fire a twelve
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
A friend of mine who was a military secure comms guy back in the 80s told me that if their position was about to be overrun the procedure was:
1) Fire a twelve gauge shotgun slug into the drive (these would have been external drives).
2) Place a thermite grenade on drive, pull pin.
3) Bug out.
- tscs37 9y agoI wouldn't bet on that being a 100% deletion. It'll probably trash most of the data but not all. Thermite grenades aren't very good at melting a huge chunk of metal either, sure it'll go straight through a machine block but it won't melt the entire machine block. To destroy all data on a harddrive all parts of the platter must be destroyed and heated to their Curie point.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoA hard drive has orders of magnitude less mass than an engine block. There's going to be nothing left of a drive but a puddle of molten metal after it's had a thermite grenade burn on it.
- tscs37 9y agoIf you check research related to this and the DEFCON talk where somebody actually put thermite into the drive, there won't be a puddle of molten metal. You can put thermite on it once you burned the parts if you want.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe DEFCON guy used 15 grams of thermite. An AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenade contains ~750 grams of thermite (technically thermate). Those are two different things. Entirely.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoHere's what 1 kg of thermite does to a hard drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lnqeodIIUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lnqeodIIUw I'm comfortable that the Curie temperature has been exceeded for all of those platters. :-)
- tscs37 9y agoGood luck getting that into a datacenter.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Houshalter 9y agoTerry Pratchett had all his unpublished works destroyed with an antique steam roller: http://mashable.com/2017/08/30/terry-pratchett-hard-drive-steamroller/#4NniIQ4oJOqH http://mashable.com/2017/08/30/terry-pratchett-hard-drive-st... Any chance that could be recovered?
- tscs37 9y agoI would say the chance of recovering any data is bigger than 0, yes.