5 ms·
Hard drive, SSD puncher of physical media with 12 tons of pressure
- jsheard 2y agoIf you happen to find yourself destroying SSDs, try not to make this mistake: https://i.imgur.com/XBbLQEQ.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XBbLQEQ.jpeg
- JadeNB 2y agoI'm sorry to be an idiot—I can't tell if I'm looking at multiple views of one thing, or one view each of multiple things, or what. Is this just demonstrating that hard drives are commonly enclosed in oversized enclosures, so that it's easy to position the punch in a way that totally misses the actual electronics?
- jsheard 2y agoThose aren't hard drives, they're solid state drives in the SATA form factor which was originally designed for hard drives. SSDs are much more compact than HDDs, so the components are usually all bunched up at one side near the connectors and the rest is just air, thus punching a hole in them at random probably won't achieve anything. Punching a hole through the PCB might not destroy the data either depending on where exactly you hit it but it would at least make it difficult to recover.
- bee_rider 2y agoHah. Kinda wonder what’s on there. Just because somebody didn’t want anybody to see. Probably just boring business records or something though.
- rwmj 2y agoI usually "dissolve" mine in a bucket of non-diet cola. Cheap & easy to source. The acid to damage electronics, and the sugar gums up mechanical parts.
- greenyies 2y agoSSD stores your data on flash chips. They are coated and only the connectors are exposed. You are not destroying anything you just make it hard to access
- rwmj 2y agoSo I don't believe the NSA are out to get me, if I did I'd want something a bit more thorough. My main "threat model" is someone picks up the drive from the trash and tries to read it. However you're wrong about this. As we know from when capacitors and batteries leak, the acid or alkali in those can get inside chip packaging by being wicked through the leads, which will destroy them thoroughly from the inside as well.
- buildsjets 2y agoIf i found an SSD that someone incompetently attempted but failed to destroy, It would DEFINITELY make me much more curious about trying to recover data off of it. The mild phosphoric acid in your cola beverage is nowhere near strong enough to cause corrosion inside of chip packaging, lol. I doubt that it is even enough to remove a significant quantity of the anodic plating on the chip leads to permit the base metal to be attacked.
- dbg31415 2y agoWouldn't a standard drill press accomplish the same thing, and be a lot cheaper?
- ashleyn 2y agoDepending on your threat model, a drill isn't even the right tool. This will significantly complicate data recovery and render data where the drill impacts it destroyed, but it will in theory still be possible to decap/analyse platters or nand with a SEM microscope and reconstruct data off the surviving parts of the storage medium. The cost may not be worth it even to some state actors, but such a cost is peanuts to the NSA, CIA, or any other organisation tasked with geopolitical standing. Depending on who's after you, they may even pass it to these organisations to get the data for them at cut-rate. Only sure-fire way is to toss it in one of those big grinders data destruction companies like Iron Mountain have. They even let you watch it go in.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> They even let you watch it go in. I wonder if/when there's a data destruction company that employs professional magicians, who swap out the drives from under you at some point, while you watch "your" drive going into the grinder, never the wiser.
- walterbell 2y ago> professional magicians Centuries of prior art on disappearing!
- Gare 2y agoWould thermite be enough?
- buildbot 2y agoIn what situation is thermite _not_ enough (Given enough thermite)? Melting tungsten?
- Tarq0n 2y agoThis reads like a press release.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoYes, I'm surprised why an advertising article for a random disk crusher (with nothing special about it as far as I can tell) is on HN. I expected this to be an hobbyist implementation, not an ad.
- Helmut10001 2y agoBetter to encrypt your drives. Like ZFS encryption. No need to destroy the hardware in this case and you're also save from someone stealing the server.
- qual 2y agoThis isn't necessarily sufficient unless you encrypt the drives before any data is written to them. If any potentially sensitive data has been written to the drive prior to encryption, the only 100% method is physical destruction. Of course, this clarification only matters if your threat model involves dealing with top-secret data and/or nation-state enemies.
- Helmut10001 2y agoI don't know, personally, I would be very unhappy if someone stole my server and then starts blackmailing me to reveal private information somewhere (unless I pay a certain sum). I don't have anything to hide, but I still don't want my private information public. I don't need to mind about this with encrypted data.
- qual 2y ago>I don't need to mind about this with encrypted data. I'm not sure if I wasn't clear or if you didn't read my comment correctly. Encrypting is not enough to prevent data recovery if data was written to disk prior to encrypting it. In other words, if you want to be 100% sure about your data being safe, you must encrypt first (when the drive is brand new), or you must physically destroy the drive.
- Helmut10001 2y agoYes, I understood - but this has nothing to do with encryption. Data that is encrypted is save. Any data that is not encrypted (or was not encrypted) would offer an attack surface. Since I use ZFS for all my data, all my data is encrypted from Minute 1 of a new hard drive.
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- poopcat 2y agoAs someone who hoards my own old USBs and hard drives, which I don’t think hold anything particularly interesting, this idea was violent at first. But yeah, I get it lol
- nixass 2y agoAs someone whose job in the past was mass destruction of HDDs and SSDs (thousands on weekly basis) for a major cloud provider this is pretty much useless. If you wanna do it efficiently on scale then something like this is much better option: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iqU9QSwHcNg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iqU9QSwHcNg And for SSDs you'd want something like this: https://phiston.com/product/mediadice-ssd-disintegrator-2c/ https://phiston.com/product/mediadice-ssd-disintegrator-2c/
- Luc 2y agoThis is designed for low hundreds per week and probably is priced much more reasonably for that market than what you are suggesting.
- nixass 2y agoYou'd be surprised how much enterprises pay for Protons and Garners. For approx tripple the price (my links above) you get about 30x throughput. But I agree, not everyone needs that speed.
- AdamJacobMuller 2y agoI did this for years with a beefy arbor press (just for mechanical drives). For our scale at the time (destroying 10s of drives a month) it worked fine and it was a great stress reliever. Get off a frustrating customer call? Go take 15 and take it out on the stack of drives needing destruction.
- throw0101b 2y agoBasically, if you want to do something properly, look at the official 'approved list' from NIST or the NSA or someone: * https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Media-Destruction-Guidance/NSA-Evaluated-Products-Lists-EPLs/ https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Media-Destruction-Guidance/NSA... * https://csrc.nist.gov/search?keywords=800-88 https://csrc.nist.gov/search?keywords=800-88
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoI recently saw a device that vibrates drives apart into it's components for easy recycling.
- mttch 2y agoYou’re thinking of Diskmantler https://garnerproducts.com/products/hard-drive-destroyers-solid-state-destroyers/diskmantler#:~:text=Automated%20HDD%20Disassembly%3A%20Through%20a,are%20ready%20for%20responsible%20recycling https://garnerproducts.com/products/hard-drive-destroyers-so....
- spacecadet 2y agoHaha what a thing to design and build, love it.
- gorgoiler 2y agoAn awful lot of the destruction can be done with a torx screwdriver: Step 1: take the screwdriver, dismantle the drive, and remove the platter(s). Step 2: take the screwdriver and gouge the platters. Step 3: take the screwdriver, lay each platter across it on the floor and stamp your foot down, hard. Destroying the metal casing is fun but it doesn’t really do an awful lot in terms of making your bits harder to read.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoDestroying the metal casing means the whole disk takes about 10 seconds to destroy, and doesn't require a "stomp on a screwdriver" step that OSHA may not approve of. Your procedure absolutely makes sense if you have a single-digit number of drives to destroy once in a while at home, not if you have to destroy dozens regularly.
- poikroequ 2y agoI hate to imagine how much ewaste is produced from destroying these drives, rather than simply wiping them and reselling them as refurbs.
- beachy 2y agoSome orgs crush entire computers, so crushing just the drives is at least better than that.
- greenyies 2y agoNever heard or seen this. Who? And why?
- pixl97 2y agoBecause it's very very hard to ensure modern computers dont have storage integrated into some unexpected part. UEFI on board can have a pretty significant amount of storage. All kinds of other devices can have storage in them too. Rather than ensure everything has been erased, they grind up the whole thing.
- nixass 2y agoIf there's even theoretical possiblity to recover even a piece of customer data you're risking your entire existence. Serious companies don't wanna do that
- tux3 2y agoThe feasability is the same whether you crush a drive or erase it normally. A serious company would worry about the people who are inside your network reading the live drives, not campfire scare stories about drives magically remembering previous values. Drives are extremely dense. If there were any way to store a value and still have any remnants of the old one, we would have slapped an error-correcting code on it and used that effect to double drive density. Companies who believe in this magical spare capacity to read values that have been overwritten suffer from an entirely irrational fear. A paranoia that there is always a possibility. The actual, non-theoretical possibility of recovering customer data is those companies being hacked by bored teenagers or everyday ransomware. Not empty drives.
- fmajid 2y agoThe German firm HSM makes a line of hard drive shredders: https://www.hsm-shredder.com/collections/digital-media-shredders https://www.hsm-shredder.com/collections/digital-media-shred... I’ve never tried one of these but I have one of their paper shredders and they are far better built than the usual semi-disposable made-in-China junk.