Title's inaccurate. I wondered what good a 60/day drill would do -- I could sledge-hammer them faster than that. 60 an HOUR though... that's pretty decent. This would be great for excessive amounts of disk disposal. I wonder if it'll clamp onto the old 5 1/4" drives (yes, we still get those in too.)

Have one of these (drilled) and then attempt to walk past a customs official. He will ask for the password. Then what?

Them: What is the password?

Me: The drive is unreadable!

Them: I need the password!

(never mind!).

$11k for a drill press? Get a Craftsman from Sears for less then $200.

<bender>

Oh, yeah... She's a bad girl...

</bender>

I actually thought the current method in militry favour was to take the patters out and shred them, that'd do the trick.

I dunno, if I was a first- or second-world country and I came across one of these "drilled drives" in an embassy dumpster, and I suspected that it had something tasty on it (the drive, not the dumpster), I'll bet I could find some means of navigating the surface. Atomic force microscope? How effective would it be to run a drill bit backwards through the spindle hole? Would that flatten the ripples enough to enable some faster method of scanning the surface? Maybe...

IIRC, US DOD standards for retiring drives that may have contained classified information require the drive to be disassembled and the oxide removed with a belt sander or grinder. I don't think this new machine is more effective.

I like the thermite, though -- even if the entire disk didn't get melted into slag, I imagine the heat would effectively randomize any remaining media. Much quicker than a belt sander, too!

I've seen the BFH method used on a laptop drive.

Judging by the number of teeny-tiny little pieces of glass platter this yielded, I'd say it was quite effective. Therapeutic, too. :)

Invest in a set of Torx, and open the drive up.

If it's a multiplatter, I've heard from HD recovery people that the platters are aligned using information on the platters itself. If you twist them apart, then the alignment is screwed up, and basically no information can be read.

If it's single platter, just take the platter out, scratch it up, and use it as a coaster.

$11k saved.

The IBM Deskstars had one big advantage here: they used a glass platter rather than a steel one. So data destruction was pretty easy - strike once, hard with a hammer.

I have drilled a drive once (for destruction reasons), but those platters are fscking hard, maybe you need a masonry drill - but that doesn' cut through the case.

Harddisks are amazingly tough things to destroy. For simple end user block, all you need to do it to spin it up and then drop (i.e. its head is unparked so you create a head crash), but that is easy for a recovery company - you need real physical damage to the platters before you can be sure it'll be hard work.

As for sledgehammer use - that doesn't guarantee unreadable platters but it's quite fun in a destructive sort of way. And you sure as hell won't do 60 an hour :-).

It's called Jamie (nearly 8) who, armed with a selection of my screwdrivers, can reduce a drive to it's component parts in less than 15 minutes.

Once the platters have been in his sand-pit for half a day, I defy anyone to recover significant data :-)

He's got to be worth 20 squids a drive, any takers?

Yeah, its not a physical destroy, but this guy knows his stuff.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

If you have loads of drives to destroy then a shredder would be loads quicker and leave the platters in teeny little bits.

Plus a shredder could be used to destroy other useless IT bits.

And, shredders are fun:

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

Pissed off with that cranky office copier? These people can bring you joy!

Got an old outhouse on my families property. I just throw them down there for the winter.

If they can get the data off after that, well, then they're welcome to it.

That's what this lot do:

http://www.data-terminators.co.uk/

Hire Large computer illiterate.

Punch a couple holes with a pick axe.

Fill holes with K2 paint remover or other industrial solvent.

It will disolve the top layer of the platters.

The other option is the 100ton hydraulic press.

Put disk in sideways and crush, turn 90 degrees and crush to cube.

I was under the impression thatThermit was the canonical method for the destruction of magnetic media.

Saying that though, I think the microwave idea is inspired and, since you could fit a fair few drives in an industrial microwave it ought to work.

My own idea (that just popped into my head) is to use induction-loop heating to melt them -- this should produce a similar result to Thermit, but without the need for combustion, I think the magnetic field might have some effect too.

For the money they charge the method is simply not good enough.

throw them in a volcano! Jobs a good'un and if some EU red tape wants to get you in trouble for incorrectly disposing of electrical goods, lets see them get some proof.

Thermite has been suggested, but no-one seems to have thought of stacking drives and piling thermite on top. Depending on what the specific drives are made of, you could get through the whole lot in one run. Perhaps about 2 mins for 20 HDDs (pessimisstically).

Another possibility is to invest in a bolt driver or rivet gun. And for added extra carnage, power up the drive before-hand. A high-powered rivet smashing through spinning platters would be fun, spectaular and very, very effective.

Most people here seem to underestimate the durability of the average harddrive. It is easy to make sure that a drive isn't readable in a computer - just snap off a few of the surface mount components near the power jack. If you want to make sure that someone with some actual money to spend doesn't read them, you have to beat them up pretty hard.

I've heard that platters are pretty heat and chemical resistant, plus I doubt a microwave would even be able to penetrate the case (probably just damaged the external circutry in the above example.)

I don't know how these ripples work in the presented device, but I imagine that they wouldn't make recovery completely impossible. I do like the thermite ideas, or any other heat enough to actually melt the platters (could be difficult, those are made from some serious materials.) Nobody has suggested shaped charges though - just bend the drive into a doughnut, then melt it, within a fraction of a second. You could probably nail a few at a time too.

And explosives are far more fun than drills or hammers : -)

Company I worked for had two step method. Step one drill press, step two metal chipper..

After I left the replaced the drill with a machine that saws them in half then puts them in the shredder then a gas furnace. We were certified as a gov approved data destruction center.

Reading all the comments above has just got me itching to get hold of a stack of old drives and put some of these ideas to the test :)

"I have drilled a drive once (for destruction reasons), but those platters are fscking hard, maybe you need a masonry drill "

No a good quality metal speed bit is all you need. Takes me maybe 10 seconds to drill right through a drive with a 3/8" bit on my drill press.

Tried powering one up that I didn't drill through the board too. Boy did it sake!

Nothing like a 4000°C flame to make short work of a hard drive. You could line up a hundred drives and just burn right through the entire stack in no time. You can slice right through the heaviest gauge steel beams with one of them, a hard drive would not stand a chance.

The toughest platters are only coated aluminium, and will melt at 660 celsius. Even a software engineer can melt it -

http://www.nobugs.org/engineer/furnace/first_smelt/index.html