So I’m thrashing around here trying to figure out whether to take this busted, brand-new hard drive back to Costco or whether…not. And if not…then what?
The Seagate external drive broke when I dropped it on the tile floor. Neither Mac and “see” it… So does that mean no one can see it?
No. A quick Google search suggests it’s not very hard for someone who knows what he’s doing to retrieve data from a broken external drive. And since Time Machine copied EVERYTHING from the MacBook onto the thing, I think I do not want to rely on a Costco clerk to disable this thing once and for all.
The accepted way to destroy a hard drive, internal or external, is to bash it with a hammer. Apparently even that is not 100% sure-fire. Dropping the busted-up drive into the garbage or the recycling bin doesn’t look like the best of all possible ideas.
I thought of soaking it in a dish of cooking oil, which would gum up the works nicely. But if bashing it isn’t fool-proof, would safflower oil be any better? 😀
How on earth to get rid of it? Finally a thought dawns on me:
This house is sitting on a quarter of an acre of land!
Duh! Bust it up as best as possible with a hammer, and then bury the remains in some random spot in the dirt.
By the time anybody digs up the yard and stumbles across this artifact, I will be dead. So will the artifact: it’ll be so far out of date no existing hardware will read it. And even if some antique computer is still running, by then the inside of the hammered hard drive will be stuffed with so much mud and dirt that no one will want to chance trying to decode it.
How convenient that it’s been raining…
So I bashed the bejayzus out of the thing with a hammer, dug a hole in the ground, dropped the remains in, and neatly covered it up with the landscaping. Within a few days, even I won’t remember where it is. And dollars to donuts, within a couple of months whatever might remain on it will be unreadable even by the NSA.
Gravedigger: DepositPhotos, © kevron2002
Meh, bash it with a hammer. The idea is to crack the drive platters so they can’t be spun up again. Then toss it into the garbage. That avoids the attack vector represented by recycling centres.
Honestly, you’re at greater risk of identity theft from someone shoulder-surfing you at the bank machine.
Where I work we run a 1/4″ drill through the drives then crush them. Then some consultant loses a laptop and all of our careful disposal measures are for naught.
Ha ha!!! Yes, I do believe you’re right!
Welp, I did bash the bejayzus out of it. (That was strangely fun…) I thought about taking the drill to it, but the thing has a metal (I presume) case and wuz worried about damaging the drill or spinning off metal shavings that would get into my feet or the dogs’.
Surely didn’t want to drop into the recycling bin. Thought about the garbage bin seriously, but then reflected upon the swarms of garbage scavengers who inhabit the hood — the dogs and I ran across one of them this morning.
Given my paranoia, it seemed less stress-inducing to inter it behind the concrete bunker….uhm, the house than to toss it into anybody’s bin.
Oh, the TERROR of losing a laptop. I had a friend who once walked off and left one in a grocery store basket. Don’t ask. God being on the side of women, she sped back to the shopping center and amazingly FOUND it, still sitting there in the parking lot.
Cleaned out our office in March – ended up with 40-50 hard drives that needed to be disposed of. Turns out the local shredding company, not only shreds paper into itty bitty pieces, but will also *shred* hard drives into bits of metal and plastic.
We took the box of drives down and it cost something like $80 to shred them all into confetti. You pay by the pound, as it turns out.
FAR easier on the body than drilling holes in them or bashing them to bits with a hammer – one or two, sure, but 50? oy.
Wow! That is a nice service. And good to know about!