There's a lot of conversation in this thread about how they take the whole computer. I can say that in 2006, in San Francisco, the police took just the hard dr

There's a lot of conversation in this thread about how they take the whole computer. I can say that in 2006, in San Francisco, the police took just the hard drives out of a tower PC in my apartment. They left the tower itself. (They were after my roommate, but since I had hardware in the "shared spaces", it was impounded along with all of his stuff. It sucked.) They also took all of the laptops whole (including my girlfriend's). The police held on to the equipment for months. We tried everything short of hiring a lawyer to get it back, but they would not release it until they actually finished the case against the guy and he got out of jail. Then, magically, our hardware was available to come pick up. Given that they had been working the case for months, I imagine that they were just sitting on the hardware long after forensics was done with it. Punitively, I suppose. Luckily, my employer at the time was very gracious and loaned my girlfriend and I hardware so we weren't completely out of pocket. When the hardware was returned to us, we had to go pick it up. The guy handing it back over made some asinine comment about "you shouldn't be copying music", and we were free to go. Everything was in bad shape. There was tape all over things, one power adapter never came back, and my girlfriend's external hard drive enclosure was cracked and clearly had been dropped. Pro tip: if you share space with someone, make sure your hardware lives in your private space. Don't leave your computers in the living room, or they will become confiscated if the people you live with get in trouble.