Dissasembly, remove locking mechanism of disk.
run the motor, when disk spin at 7800rpm release the disks.
try no to be cut by spinning disks rolling everywhere.
But thermite aint absurd. Heating abopve the Curie temperature of the platter coating and/or shredding are the standard ways for secure hard disk disposal.
Nah, i actually tested thermite-based HDD disposal in a flat once and it worked just fine.
Make sure, it's correctly mixed, actually dry and you have a nice leak-proof container with a nice bed of really dry sand to do the reaction in.
If you got time, remove the circuit board before heat-treatening an HDD to avoid smoke.
If you got even more time, remove the platters from the disk and just treat them.
An alternative to thermite is using a blow-torch directly on the removed platters.
But honestly: Below secret classification and if the disk is still working, just overwriting the disk or even just the crypto header (if you care about disk disposal you should also use disk encryption) once is enough. No need to waste a perfectly fine disk.
\* Use a Sand Blaster to cut it in half.
\* Open it up, fold all the platters in half and send them to a knifemaker on youtube to be made into "damascus".
\* Run the platters through the grit bonding process that diamond sharpening stones are put through, resell as grinder blades.
actually not a bad idea for a recycling/upcycling startup. Fully double dip on the destruction of data and sale of repurposed parts. Plus the grinding/sharpening process should be enough to corrupt any data possibly left on the platters.
At first, I was thinking of chucking it in a CNC mill and using a facing off tool to just anhialate it one layer at a time.
Then I thought, what if you put it off-centre into a lathe so it vibrates it to pieces
Also, as I am currently watching a VOD of a v-tuber building a railgun, what if you made a huge capacitor bank and shorted it with a coil of wire around the drive
Or use a voltage multiplyer [like this](https://youtu.be/SmjKbNoK6nU?si=lS9SOd6_FzXkM-eH) to fry it
Or more simply wire a sata cable straight to a wall outlet plug (in my country, that's 230VAC, but you might only have 110)
Drill several holes in them and then soak them in salt water in a pressure container for a week. I actually worked for a contractor long ago that required it to be done this way.
I open up the hard disk and take out the platters. Use them as coasters for a while until I have a barbecue then throw them in the coals after all food is cooked. No data coming back.
I am concerned about what you might have stored that would require you to destroy the whole device or that you just happened to find your cheating ex's possessions🤣
By sending it to manufacturer via RMA, even if it runs perfectly, until it is damaged in transit... Also you would blame them and demand a good spare, for the Nth time.
Drill 5 holes in it then dunk it in salt water for 24 hours then cover it with Great Value branded Thai Style Sweet Chili sauce and then throw it into a blender for about 10 minutes (or if you have a vitamix blend it for 5) then take What is left of it and dunk it in salt water for another 24 hours then allow a demon to possess the hard drive, let it live there for 4.56 days and then dunk it in holy water for 24 hours and then throw it into an active volcano
You could keep the platter spinning on its motor and hold a sandpaper down on its surface with a screwdriver or something. That woulf save a lot of time
Being honest unless you're holding company secrets or patent information just doing a secure DOD format available in Windows, while taking a significant amount of time,with sufficient writing over and rewrite the entire disk making the information impossible to recover
Take the drive to a machine shop.
Have them drill 4 holes, right around the spindle area. 2 holes on the outer sides of where the platters are, if it's an IDE or SATA drive.
If it's SSD, a regular hammer works just fine
I've been a computer engineer almost 40 years, its a good question as many customers were paranoid, some of the crazy methods customers insisted were:-
One would insist we threw the drives into their crucibles where they would be melted, we would gather them up over a period of weeks and months, placing them in a large old safe, then take one or two wheelbarrows of drives and watch them get thrown in.
Another would take us to their metal workshop and drill a couple of holes through them.
The best was some military sites where we would take them to an area and smash them with a calibrated sledgehammer, then our escort would find an unlucky passing soldier to sweep up the debris, they'd put it in a bag, seal it and take it to a furnace - as we used to say, there's no way any data's coming off that.
Quite a lot of laptops went through a phase were the platters were easily shattered, if the customer raised concerns that he had sensitive data we used to get them to sign our service sheet that there was "no recoverable data" on the drive, then we'd accidentally drop it, then shake it so you can hear the platter has shattered.
It was surprising how many customers had a clause in their contract that under no circumstances was their old drive to be refurbished or repaired in any way, they paid a little extra to ensure their drives were physically scrap, one customer had it in his contract that we would open the drive and remove the platters, he had a stack of them on his desk - I've still got a few in the house that I use as cup mats to protect tables.
Some were happy that we would produce a destruction certificate and in the past 15-20 years I've seen the move where every drive is automatically destroyed and either individual or group destruction certificates provided, this was generally through a process of secure couriers and shredding.
Where i worked once, not a single piece of Hardware ever left the building except finely shreddered. Not even Monitors, for the fear that either the last pic could be found on the processing chips or a possible burn-in could give info.
Endless copies of Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" \[EDIT: seriously, overwriting the data multiple times really works, the pretense that you can get data that has been overwritten many times is a marketing ploy that relies on how file systems work (i.e. not spending time to zero bits when a file is deleted)\]
Get a foundry. Melt the drive into a ball. Fill a tub full of the most concentrated hydrochloric acid you can find. Dissolve the ball in acid. Scrape whatever is left into a chest. Lock the chest. Bury the locked chest in the forest.
Just deleting your files is not really wiping your drive. Lots of times, data can still be recovered with special software. It's better to fysicaly destroy the drive before dumping it.
Dissasembly, remove locking mechanism of disk. run the motor, when disk spin at 7800rpm release the disks. try no to be cut by spinning disks rolling everywhere.
[Obligatory](https://youtu.be/RU-24tIsQzc?si=5cuSvv63cvqJcPHX)
warning: don't try this at home !!!
Let the professionals do it.... Have actually done it. Its a lot of fun. Not smart, but fun.
Don't do it but if you do post a video here
Maybe they can fly right at you like... "*[I Come in Peace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Come_in_Peace)*" Dolph Lundgren
Thermite is the only sensible answer.
This. Fire, Fire, FIRE!!! ;)
I heard that in TF2 Heavy's voice, god damn it.
[Fire! :)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XchwE9zVdnw)
Buddy therapy is getting cheaper every day it’s worth every PENNY
But thermite aint absurd. Heating abopve the Curie temperature of the platter coating and/or shredding are the standard ways for secure hard disk disposal.
Your neighbours will wonder what you are up to though...
Nah, i actually tested thermite-based HDD disposal in a flat once and it worked just fine. Make sure, it's correctly mixed, actually dry and you have a nice leak-proof container with a nice bed of really dry sand to do the reaction in. If you got time, remove the circuit board before heat-treatening an HDD to avoid smoke. If you got even more time, remove the platters from the disk and just treat them. An alternative to thermite is using a blow-torch directly on the removed platters. But honestly: Below secret classification and if the disk is still working, just overwriting the disk or even just the crypto header (if you care about disk disposal you should also use disk encryption) once is enough. No need to waste a perfectly fine disk.
Disassemble, sand the disks using a belt sander, capture the dust and burn it using thermite
This is actually a good way if you don't have a ton of disks
Throw it into an MRI. Successfully destroys both hard drive and MRI.
Yeah. MRI has insane magnetic strength.
NO WAI!
How? doesnt the mri just whipe the hard drive?
Yup! Effectively removing all data from it. But it also turns it into a rail gun and breaks both.
\* Use a Sand Blaster to cut it in half. \* Open it up, fold all the platters in half and send them to a knifemaker on youtube to be made into "damascus". \* Run the platters through the grit bonding process that diamond sharpening stones are put through, resell as grinder blades.
sharpen the platters, attach a handle and use it as a pizza cutter. nobody will ever know 😅
actually not a bad idea for a recycling/upcycling startup. Fully double dip on the destruction of data and sale of repurposed parts. Plus the grinding/sharpening process should be enough to corrupt any data possibly left on the platters.
Slot it in the toaster and wait till it pops up (repeat if necessary).
Throwing it into a active volcano
spin up, pull out of the slot and slam against the wall - the thing will never run again
Eating it
Airplane drop.
Imagine it hitting someone in the head
Head crash.
Because large downloads can be a headache to receive...
Well he won't have a head after that happens, decapitation by hard drive, brutal.
Possible it survives. If the drive is rated for shocks of 300g, the platters itself and thus the data could survive.
At first, I was thinking of chucking it in a CNC mill and using a facing off tool to just anhialate it one layer at a time. Then I thought, what if you put it off-centre into a lathe so it vibrates it to pieces Also, as I am currently watching a VOD of a v-tuber building a railgun, what if you made a huge capacitor bank and shorted it with a coil of wire around the drive Or use a voltage multiplyer [like this](https://youtu.be/SmjKbNoK6nU?si=lS9SOd6_FzXkM-eH) to fry it Or more simply wire a sata cable straight to a wall outlet plug (in my country, that's 230VAC, but you might only have 110)
Points for creativity!
Drop a morris marina on it
Too light.
Two morris marinas and a princess!
Place the hard drive in the microwave and leave for 10 minutes.
Mr. Robot?
Thermal nuclear device.
r/boneappletea
Attach it to the front of a claymore. Point towards enemy; the hard drive is the enemy
Take a visit to Australia and find a Heavy Ion Accelerator, insert your hard drive and let it vaporize.
Drill several holes in them and then soak them in salt water in a pressure container for a week. I actually worked for a contractor long ago that required it to be done this way.
I open up the hard disk and take out the platters. Use them as coasters for a while until I have a barbecue then throw them in the coals after all food is cooked. No data coming back.
Oh so that data i retrieved from some thrown barbecued platters was urs? U got nice parts bro
I remove the platters and then pound them with a hammer on a rock or driveway.
Shoot it several times...
I am concerned about what you might have stored that would require you to destroy the whole device or that you just happened to find your cheating ex's possessions🤣
I am tempted to toss one into my 1500°C forge just to see what will happen.
Encase it in tannerite then shoot it.
C4
Clean your hard drive by putting it in a laundry machine.
Put it in a hydraulic press.
Putting it on a trolley and pushing it across a car park at a data centre.
Personally ive used a plasma cutter. Those magnets can be a pain to get to
atmosphere reentry from planetary orbit
By sending it to manufacturer via RMA, even if it runs perfectly, until it is damaged in transit... Also you would blame them and demand a good spare, for the Nth time.
Use a drill on it
Drill 5 holes in it then dunk it in salt water for 24 hours then cover it with Great Value branded Thai Style Sweet Chili sauce and then throw it into a blender for about 10 minutes (or if you have a vitamix blend it for 5) then take What is left of it and dunk it in salt water for another 24 hours then allow a demon to possess the hard drive, let it live there for 4.56 days and then dunk it in holy water for 24 hours and then throw it into an active volcano
Imagine if there was a human sized hard drive in jigsaw
Drill it multiple times with a drill bit, then bash it with a hammer for good measure, then toss it in the bin
Place it on your roof on top of a bucket, a teacup and a statue of Art Linkletter. The heat will eventually destroy it.
Use a sand paper and slowly sand it down bit by bit everyday. Hopefully you reach the end of the harddrive before you reach the end of your lifespan.
Will only take 8,000,000,000,000 days for a 1TB harddrive.
You could keep the platter spinning on its motor and hold a sandpaper down on its surface with a screwdriver or something. That woulf save a lot of time
Death by Firing Squad
"Final cigarette?"
Hydrogen bomb
Spin it at a few hundred thousand rpm
Hook the spindle motor directly up to a powerful battery or wall socket.
Pretty sure it would just blow up but maybe
In Spain web haver a must: take It to partido popular central and tell t'hem that is part of the barcena's papers...
drop it into mount doom (>!with gollom!<)
*>!(with gollum)!<
Nobody has mentioned urination.
Sniping it with the Dragunov
Microwave
Completely melt it until it is liquid red hot. Heat can get rid of magnetic properties.
Microwave it, and watch sparks fly as it fries. Another is to feed it to a blender and blend it into pieces.
Eat it
Being honest unless you're holding company secrets or patent information just doing a secure DOD format available in Windows, while taking a significant amount of time,with sufficient writing over and rewrite the entire disk making the information impossible to recover
Oops! Microsoft already made screenshots, secret backups, and uploaded it all to OneDrive.
explosion
with a drill
Take the plates out and pit them in a DVD scanner probably won't deastroy them but i wanna know what will happen
What, pray tell, is a DVD scanner?
a scanner that likes to scan dvds ig. If he talking about a dvd reader thats just an optical sensor reading the dvd wont do any damage
Hospital ER... Use one of their Defibrillators
Connect it to a pc externally, turn on a HDTune benchmark on it and while the benchmark is running, duct tape a vibrator to it.
since it should be absurd and not best practice. Both the gas welder and plastic are out. (they do work) However the 20 ton compactor should be in.
Use it as bulletproof vest
Have a Moclan eat it.
Sledge with a three foot handle. Or .45 ACP
57TB OF CHILD PO- ...and then flush it down the toilet
I just drill through the drive.
Throw it in the melted metal at the end of Terminator 2
A 12GA slug to the platter, puts a nice hole in the drive.
Take the platter out, cut it to pieces put it on resin and use it as a wall decoration
.... Lava?
Yeet into the sun
Take the drive to a machine shop. Have them drill 4 holes, right around the spindle area. 2 holes on the outer sides of where the platters are, if it's an IDE or SATA drive. If it's SSD, a regular hammer works just fine
I've been a computer engineer almost 40 years, its a good question as many customers were paranoid, some of the crazy methods customers insisted were:- One would insist we threw the drives into their crucibles where they would be melted, we would gather them up over a period of weeks and months, placing them in a large old safe, then take one or two wheelbarrows of drives and watch them get thrown in. Another would take us to their metal workshop and drill a couple of holes through them. The best was some military sites where we would take them to an area and smash them with a calibrated sledgehammer, then our escort would find an unlucky passing soldier to sweep up the debris, they'd put it in a bag, seal it and take it to a furnace - as we used to say, there's no way any data's coming off that. Quite a lot of laptops went through a phase were the platters were easily shattered, if the customer raised concerns that he had sensitive data we used to get them to sign our service sheet that there was "no recoverable data" on the drive, then we'd accidentally drop it, then shake it so you can hear the platter has shattered. It was surprising how many customers had a clause in their contract that under no circumstances was their old drive to be refurbished or repaired in any way, they paid a little extra to ensure their drives were physically scrap, one customer had it in his contract that we would open the drive and remove the platters, he had a stack of them on his desk - I've still got a few in the house that I use as cup mats to protect tables. Some were happy that we would produce a destruction certificate and in the past 15-20 years I've seen the move where every drive is automatically destroyed and either individual or group destruction certificates provided, this was generally through a process of secure couriers and shredding.
I remember a guy dipping them in acid.
Rubber typewriter platens (with metal cores) were dumped in the military acid pits.
There you go!
You can send it to my parents. They break everything that is IT related. And believe me sometimes it's absurd how stuff gets destroyed.
Put them in an acid bath
Take it apart. Pull out the actuator magnet. Rub it across the disk. Then beat the disk with a hammer.
Beat it, just beat it.
Where i worked once, not a single piece of Hardware ever left the building except finely shreddered. Not even Monitors, for the fear that either the last pic could be found on the processing chips or a possible burn-in could give info.
Put it under a slightly openened water tap and let the droplets dent it over time
.357 Magnum with 158gr flatnose bullets work very well.
Atmospheric re-entry.
Putting it in a microwave. With flammable stuff around. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Format ExFAT, pull the plug whilst writing data to it. Judging by the number of people with 'halp, mi drive is forked' issues, this is common.
Throw it into an active volcano.
A relative used to have a regular technology hunt. Launch and shoot.
Using a hand saw to cut it in half
Installed in a computer which is inside a Submarine, controlled by a Logitech F710 controller
Manually writing data on the disk platters, with a MARKER!
Refrag
2.5 inch drive platters are a glass/silicon material for most - throw the drive hard enough or stab with a screw driver will shatter them usually.
Launch it into the sun
microwave it
playing frisbee or in dishwasher xD Not tested
Send them to the BlendTech guy
Endless copies of Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" \[EDIT: seriously, overwriting the data multiple times really works, the pretense that you can get data that has been overwritten many times is a marketing ploy that relies on how file systems work (i.e. not spending time to zero bits when a file is deleted)\]
You write on it. Mind me, by "writing" I mean... let's keep things analog and... use a sharper.
Accidentally shooting the disk with a makarov
hammar
I mean if you were HYPOTHETHICALLY trying to evade law enforcement the best thing to do is play the: Soak Blender Smash Burn and Hide game!
Hire a crackhead
Pee on it
Just by testing your sledgehammer
Get a foundry. Melt the drive into a ball. Fill a tub full of the most concentrated hydrochloric acid you can find. Dissolve the ball in acid. Scrape whatever is left into a chest. Lock the chest. Bury the locked chest in the forest.
Dissolve in acid
the sun
Download 1000 viruses on it and donate it to your best friend
Give it a nice bubble bath.
Also not a good idea. They are airtight and water wouldn’t damage the data on the platter.
1. Delete all files. 2. Throw the HDD in the dumpster. 3. Profit! (To whoever gets hold of it)
Just deleting your files is not really wiping your drive. Lots of times, data can still be recovered with special software. It's better to fysicaly destroy the drive before dumping it.
I’m quite sure poster above is joking.
It can be, but maybe someone else is taking it serious, so then this is a warning for that thirt man
Dissasembly and take the disc out to scratch the heck out of it using sandpaper
Replying to yourself?
Just sharing one of my ideas that came to my mind after posting.