The 'Three Ton' Hard Drive Destroyer

Barence writes "Last year, PC Pro welcomed a DIY-style hard-disk destroyer into its Labs to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting platters. Now the technology has moved on, with the Ideal 0101 — a device that pierces disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force. 'It's not the quick cut-and-shut process you'd assume it is,' says PC Pro's reviewer. 'Instead, the 0101 seems to enjoy its particular method of torture.The punch emerges from the side of the bay, slowing piercing its way through metal, silicon and glass, before retreating once the disk is destroyed.'" I attached a video clip.

Re:recycling

[vlm]

I've given the platters to my girl fiend as purse mirrors. I also keep one in my car for when people have their high beams on behind me. Not sure why, but the surface is a near perfect mirror. And since it's not really deformable (brittle, not elastic) the image is always near perfect. Minus the hole in the center.

If you can toss them correctly they also fly rather well, requires you to snap the wrist.

I just don't see how this destroys 'everything'. A small hole like than in only a portion of the disk will still leave quite a bit of data.

There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter. Everyone whom does what we do, eventually has the "shattering" experience of discovering their first glass platter hard drive. And being precision ground surfaces they can't be prestressed like car windows, they leave some very nasty sharp jagged chunks of glass. Keep the 1st aid kit handy...

The large old aluminum ones (think 5.25 or bigger) also rang with a clang you cannot believe if dropped on a tile floor. Deafening, almost. Don't try with the glass platters.

Re:Kind of silly.

[EdZ]

Even cheaper, but not as fast, is the ATA SECURE ERASE command. Wipes your data even better than DD (because it erases 'bad' sectors from the G-list too), and is built into pretty much every HDD manufactured in the last 6-10 years.

The myth about '32 erase cycles' and similar nonsense about reading data with an AFM is pure bollocks, and has been since the introduction of MR (and later GMR, CMR and TMR) head drives nearly 20 years ago (15 for non-IBM drives).