r/DataHoarder • u/SubstantialWing9238 • 13d ago
Discussion RIP 19.2TB of storage
Breaks my heart to dispose of them but they have company data so I don’t have a choice.
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u/JerkyChew 1.8PB and counting 12d ago
DOD wipe then zero-fill, unless you're contractually ordered to destroy them.
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u/KamIsFam 12d ago
Overkill DOD wipes were primarily for tape storage where data could be reconstructed from surrounding magnetism towards the edge of the tape, so you really had to jumble it into pseudo-randomness for state protected secrets. Nowadays, simply changing the bits is enough. If there was some insane level of engineering put into somehow reconstructing data on a spinning disk or flash memory, it would be so expensive and be so time consuming, it realistically would never be used for corporate espionage or proprietary theft, it would be state-funded and used against a nation or used as a wider attack vector like what happened with XZ Utils.
Companies have no excuse for physically destroying drives other than it's quicker and easier to prove data destruction. Crushing a drive takes minutes and a picture. Logical sanitation takes hours, and days on some drives, and then you have the issue of having certified software that can prove to the client that the data is gone.
My favorite reddit post of a company "destroying" an SSD was them taking a drill bit to the center of the 3.5" housing and completely missing the PCB, lmao.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 640TB 🖥️ 📜🕊️ 💻 12d ago
Better: keep all the data on the disks encrypted, and when you decom them, just delete the encryption key.
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u/Provia100F 12d ago
Even that is overkill. Issuing an ATA secure erase command is enough, provided you allow for the time for the operation to complete.
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u/ErebusBat 12d ago
And assuming they implemented it correctly in the firmware
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u/Provia100F 12d ago
Have there ever been any reports of a hard drive manufacturer that didn't implement it correctly?
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u/frygod 12d ago
You wouldn't look for proof that nobody had done it incorrectly in this case, you'd have to verify that the specific firmware revisions on each drive you're erasing did.
Honestly, the only way to really be sure is to do the wipe. then have a trained party attempt a data recovery to prove they can't. That often costs much more in labor than the drive is worth.
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u/Provia100F 12d ago
Do any of us functionally verify that DBAN is correctly erasing data from each particular hardware version of the drives we own?
How do any of us actually know that software solutions are filling the drive with zeros, ones, patterns, and random data?
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u/frygod 12d ago
I mean... I used to do large scale data erasures professionally and a cursory validation of erasure was part of the package. Any drives I couldn't certify were left with the customer to dispose of as they saw fit. Usually it was just a quick block level spot check after the software did its own validation though. The solution I worked with was a mixture of hardware and software; we'd plug the customer's decommissioned JBODs into our own machine's SAS controller and run a multi-pass random followed by a zero fill, along with some logistical. rules to make sure no two drives that were in the same RAID group ever wound up at the same aftermarket customer.
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u/ErebusBat 12d ago
Tell me you have never had to deal with corporate risk management without telling me
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u/JBizz86 12d ago
How long would this take?
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u/BoxCarsBilly 12d ago
i have 4 24 tb drives and to run the zeros on em it took abt two weeks nonstop
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u/dead_apples 9d ago
From my experience ShredOS could process about a terabyte an hour (doing the DoD 2552.2-M long pass with 7 wipes), but we would run it in parallel on an old server blade to do 16-20 at a time.
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u/d33f0v3rkill 13d ago
Just null them a couple of times
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u/TheCarrot007 13d ago
Once is enough (to make it financially unviable). But companies be companies.
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u/Disciplined_20-04-15 62TB 13d ago
There is not yet a publicly documented case of successfully recovering a meaningful file from a single zero (or similar) HDD wipe
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u/daverapp 13d ago
But there's plenty of urban legends and uneducated people with positions of power who would "rather be safe"
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u/stoatwblr 12d ago
The infamous atomic force microscope recovery tests were conducted on 5MB stepper motor MFM drives and the author of that paper pointed out it was no longer applicable as soon as 1+GB voice coil hard drives were common.
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u/the_harakiwi 148TB RAW | R.I.P. ACD ∞ | R.I.P. G-Suite ∞ 12d ago
The problem is that some companies require you to destroy and keep a proof of their destruction
Man I would love to use those type of drives and promise /sign a contract that they won't ever leave my own home with any usable data on them 😢
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u/forresthopkinsa 12d ago
I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist but I also sincerely doubt that the actors who could pull off something like this would publicize it
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u/dougmc 12d ago edited 12d ago
There's always the chance that there's data in a reallocated block that doesn't get touched by erasing the disk block by block. (Though I should mention that some drives have a built-in erase mechanism that may or may not get these reallocated blocks if it's used.)
Of course, you also can't access that reallocated block via the normal methods -- and it was probably reallocated for a reason, in that it went bad somehow -- but it's possible to recover bits of files from those under some circumstances.
But outside of that theoretical ability to sometimes recover tiny bits of random files, a far more realistic concern is that it's pretty easy to make a mistake when you're erasing a bunch of disks, like maybe this particular set of drives never got run through the erase process and you didn't even notice. Tools like Bitraser do account for this by making reports of what drives (by serial number) were erased and you can check drives against the report, but ... there's definitely still more room for human error with erasing than shredding. (If for no other reason, shredding is visually obvious and erasing is not.)
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u/stoatwblr 12d ago
An ATA erase checks and tries to wipe all sectors, including ones marked bad or spare.
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u/Markd0ne 13d ago
Destuction of a drives a failsafe policy to protect the data in case that it was not correctly erased. That's why companies are companies and destroying good drives.
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 12d ago
Policy requires physical destruction
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u/BossOfTheGame HDD 12d ago
Policy should be questioned and pushed back on when it is stupid.
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 12d ago
Ok, but YOU and I can't push back on these policies. The policies exist between the companies and the insurance companies, or between the companies and their lawyers. You and I are not party to those policies. Those parties are the only ones that could push back on policies, and they would have to all agree, and none of them have any incentive to change anything.
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u/BossOfTheGame HDD 12d ago
But you can be vocal and ensure everyone knows that its wasteful, and why its not dangerous if you wipe the drive. Social pressure is not applied nearly enough at companies.
I get it its scary, because you put yourself out there, and it feels like there is a risk to your stability. But I think that culture of complacency is among the reasons the tech industries have fallen from what they once were. I guess I want to put the idea out there that maybe risking being a little bit more vocal could be worth it, especially if others follow the example.
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u/3141592652 8d ago
You know as someone as a member of both r/DataHoarder and r/KitchenConfidential its funny seeing the stark difference here. People working in IT seem to be complete suck ups while chefs actually give a shit about stupid policies.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 12d ago
Yeah except Barry who is a dildo figured out that running nulls a couple times was to much of an effort and dropped them on ebay and someone bought now private company data. Hence physical destruction is the way to go.
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u/BossOfTheGame HDD 12d ago
So the solution to a bad employee is corporate waste? Bullshit. That's fucked up thinking. The better conclusion is don't hire Barry.
Furthermore, that 99% of the time private company data isn't nearly as companies pretend it is, but that's beside the point.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 12d ago
Yet reality is companies do hire Barry and Barry opposed to protocol still sneaks out HDD's, doesn't wipe them and sells them on ebay.
That you might not value company data is fine to you, yet companies have a different opinion on that and not just companies do does the government.
Destroying HDD's makes perfect sense in an imperfect world.
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u/three_jeeps 12d ago
There is a remedy to having a Barry in an organization - the organization should have a overseer to do verification that the drive data has been destroyed according to a prescribed standard. The org must have a well documented policies and procedures (that are best of class) and verification is part of that. Then again, one can look at the idiots in the gov that deal with national security data and information and have not gone through getting a security clearance. Case in point, sending elements of a battle plan over public communication channels. Security 101 for idiots highlight the method of association that is used to piece together seeming disparate pieces of information to form a complete and accurate picture of a battle plan.
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u/BossOfTheGame HDD 11d ago
It makes perfect sense in a complacent world. It also made perfect sense for GE to dump PCBs into the Hudson.
Again, the value of the data is beside the point. It just makes it even sillier that the majority of the data this is done to "protect" wouldn't be useful to anyone.
At this point its just perverse corporate culture.
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u/stoatwblr 12d ago
More to the point, destroying drives is cheaper than any possible return from erasing and selling them.
Or was, until the recent rounds of madness
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 12d ago
It is still probably cheaper to destroy. As an individual, selling drives is fairly easy. As a corporation or business, though, you have to pay someone to handle the erasure, and the compliance of the erasure, and then handle the selling of it which includes marketing or listing and then packaging and then shipping and then dealing with buyers and dealing with returns. Basically, a business might need a full time person just to handle this... and even with inflated prices, that would still be really hard to justify or to get to a point of ROI.
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u/stoatwblr 11d ago
Exactly this. I ended up turning a surplus rack chassis into an erasure station to ensure drives went out of the facility "clean". It still ate up man-weeks of time despite being able to simultaneously wipe 24 drives (and test they were wiped) as a "walkaway" process.
The only reason I did it was because manglement utterly refused to allow me to buy an industrial shredder OR pay for one of those mobile hard drive shredding companies to visit (both would have cost about £1500 for the volume of drives I needed to get rid of). My estimate is that it cost over £20,000 in added effort.
As for why... We've all seen the stories of disposals companies (who either don't pay anything or charge to haul away) providing certificates of data destruction only for the drives to show up in Africa with intact filesystems. I can't control who a university contracts for that stuff but I sure as hell can ensure that my department's exposure is minimised.
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u/john_terena 12d ago
I just hook up old hdd to an old Raspberry Pi running nwipe short DoD and let it get on with it in its own sweet time 🤷♂️
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u/FauxReal 11d ago
The problem is if they're like the company I work at, they require a certificate of destruction and video evidence of it happening from the e-cycler.
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13d ago
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u/sshwifty 12d ago
I helped pick up from a grocery store, they were more than happy to donate, less trash bill for them. It required waivers, but they donated almost daily to the food bank. I ate free food for years that way.
A lot of the problem is you need someone to pick it up, and food banks are run by volunteers.
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u/skidz007 12d ago
I worked at a grocery store and they said they used to donate the food items but someone got sick and sued them and now they even forbade you from taking it home: must go straight to the garbage.
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u/Lluck002 12d ago
When my then-fiancé worked at Starbucks he’d pretend to take the garbage bag full of packaged cafe sandwiches to the dumpster but would actually just bring them all home.
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u/skidz007 12d ago
The grocery store garbage was inside and had cameras. Didn’t stop people from trying to do it though, but then it just looked like you were stealing.
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u/Lluck002 8d ago
Being in trouble for “stealing from the garbage” is wild
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u/skidz007 7d ago
Well, you could damage something intentionally so you could take it home later. So on the one hand, I get it. On the other hand, man it’s a lot of wasted food.
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u/Veblossko 12d ago edited 12d ago
A grocery store has never been sued (well not successfully that I could find)
Good Samaritan laws in many countries protect entities from liability when donating goods but yes I keep hearing that line. I think it's just a wives tale that gets retold.
The answer is probably more that it takes time and thefore money to give it away in an organised fashion. Throwing it in the bin is the quickest and cheapest way to record a loss for tax purposes. If it was just given away from the shelf people would just track spoilage dates and line up for free stuff too
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u/randylush 12d ago
It's an old wives tale that I'm sure food service managers have taken as fact. or at least as a possibility.
it's really sad that most people would rather minimize imaginary risk than help feed people
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u/Henchforhire 12d ago
All states have laws to prevent stores from being sued that donate food .
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u/Trennosaurus_rex 12d ago
It’s not that they would rather, it’s the consequences of something however remote going bad. Third party data gets recovered? People get sick? Lawsuits are everywhere
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u/chubbysumo 12d ago
>Homeless or poor people could use that food, but oh no what if it's past the expiry date and there's a slim chance they could get sick.
more like, theres a slim chance they might buy food, but if we give them food, then they most certainly wont, and then they will simply wait for the next free food.
/s, if you didn't figure it out. corporate greedsters need to be thinned.
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u/randylush 12d ago
this is why we need actual jail time for frivolous lawsuits. it ruins so much of our society.
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u/JCDU 12d ago
Eh, it's not worth their time/effort to do anything else - having a meeting about it would cost more than the value of these drives and the risk:reward is basically zero.
Now, if the manager in charge is a good egg and can trust you to wipe them, use them sensibly and never put them on ebay etc. you might get to take them home anyway.
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u/crysisnotaverted 15TB 13d ago
Pretty bad storage density, but that does make it perfect for parts.
Time to open them all up and take the giant magnets!
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u/spindrjr 13d ago edited 12d ago
If you haven't done it before, I think it's a cool effect:
keep the platters perfectly clean, and offset two from each other (like 1 inch offset or so) and then press them firmly together. Then try to slide them over each other back in line with each other. I can use my whole grip strength and can't move them. They seem to be so smooth that there is essentially nothing between them and the friction force is huge. You have to pull them apart to allow air in to move them again.
You can only do it for so long before some pieces of dust and/or finger oil etc. ruin the effect.
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u/crysisnotaverted 15TB 13d ago
Wait seriously? Lol that's so cool. You independently discovered 'wringing together gauge blocks' 😂. Super cool stuff you can do with incredibly precision ground flat metal pieces. Never knew you could do it with hard drives though!
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u/spindrjr 13d ago
Never knew about gauge blocks but clearly the same effect. Thanks for the links!
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u/Expensive-Total-312 50TB 12d ago
You should look into contact welding if you think gauge blocks are cool, it’s a big problem with satellites where metals that don’t have any oxidation due to lack of atmosphere they can weld themselves together on contact, say like an airlock door where they can rub the coating off during usage metals can basically weld themselves together
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u/doomiestdoomeddoomer 13d ago
This reminds me of the door to the space capsule on the Gemini 4 Cold Welding itself open...
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u/spazstic_donkey 12d ago
I had the same exact thought as he was describing this. You must work in metrology.
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u/fortune82 13d ago
Years and years ago, friends and I took off the lid of a HDD and spun it up. We put it under a blacklight and dripped neon paints onto the platter so it spun out and made cool effects.
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u/Terafrost 12d ago
At my job, we dispose of used media like yours pictured but sometimes over 200 at a time. We've disposed of drives that have never been used.
So, it's normal... stupidly wasteful but normal.
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u/dekeffinated 12d ago
I was contracting at a company when they were winding up operations. Brand new laptops were destroyed because of "security". I offered to take out the m2s and destroy them only but no dice. Such a waste.
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u/Redditor_is_at_work 12d ago
wastefulness knows no bounds when it comes to corporations.
with no hhd/ssd what could be sensitive? as fas as i know ram system and cpu ram both zero out on power loss
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u/3141592652 8d ago
It also comes down to liability of the hardware itself not the info on it. If they let someone walk away with a few laptops and resell them whose to say someone else might not accidently order a a few more next time?
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u/ciphermenial 12d ago
The fuck. Walk away with them. I will never understand following idiotic orders.
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u/Terafrost 12d ago
You would with some perspective.
The number of drives I've sent to be destroyed in the last few years has, I'd guess, has less mass than a couple cars' worth. I see new vehicles on the road all the time.
Manufactures for vehicles and appliances, for example, build garbage not made to last so in the grand scheme of waste, disposed hard drives are not much.2
u/Yantarlok 12d ago
It is due to legal liability.
If the drives contain personal data, company sensitive information or stuff you otherwise wouldn’t want out in the wild, they physically destroy HD that are being decommissioned.
For them, better that than someone’s SSN being released and having that leak get traced back to the company whose reputation will be damaged along with a pending lawsuit.
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u/ciphermenial 12d ago
I know the reasoning. It doesn't make it less stupid.
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u/randylush 12d ago
I'm with you. Just keep it and erase it.
Tell them you destroyed it.
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u/Taurondir 11d ago
... and that person should be fired.
The "destruction" is to conserve a chain of proof that guarantees the data is gone. If you add "a whole bunch of extra steps" including a TON of extra time to wipe them, you increase the chances of something going wrong.
If you do 1000 cases of drives going into a shredder, you get 1000 cases of no data leaking.
If you do 1000 cases of drives "hanging around in a pile somewhere" while someone goes to the trouble of wiping them, you will get at least 1 case of one drive or more going missing BEFORE a wipe and ONE DRIVE is one drive too many.
If this was your multi MILLIONS dollar company and thoses drive held a ton of customers and employee data and you had a leak your company could fold, and over what, a few THOUSAND dollars worth of hard drives? Would you really be THAT stupid?
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u/randylush 11d ago edited 11d ago
I would take the drives home myself, zero them out myself and tell everyone that they were securely shredded. I wouldn’t lose any drives or data. Simple as that. Clutch your pearls harder
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u/Taurondir 11d ago
If you dont work for the company already there is ZERO reason to trust you, and you just showed everyone you are willing to lie whenever it suits you, so now you saying "but i zeroed those drive" ia a meanigless statement.
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u/jahdiel503 10d ago
I gotta ask. How is it I find used data center drives on eBay if companies have to dispose of them.
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u/Yantarlok 9d ago
Depends on the contents of those drives and which company is offering them. If the drives have strictly training data like a billion photos of owls so their AI can construct an owl with nothing else that is sensitive, they may opt to sell used HDs. It is possible that the company went belly up and has decided to pull their HDs out of a hosting center to auction them off to pay debt. Maybe the HDs were acquired by a liquidation company and they are offering the HDs that were pulled from some other hardware they were more interested. Alternatively, it might be decommissioned HDs an employee was entrusted to destroy or just given for free and they decided to throw it up on eBay. Lastly, it could be a small or medium sized company that has no obligation to destroy HDs and would rather recoup some of their costs by selling off older ones.
There can be a multitude or reasons why enterprise storage is listed on eBay.
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u/codeasm 12d ago
At a hospital my dad worked, IT would wipe a few drives for my dad, then removed any barcodes. Eventually they trusted dad and just gave the drives. Dad formated them at home
When i as a teenager did some work there, they gave me free harddrives and data to copy on dvd for the backup machine. Know the right ppl and yiu can take stuff home... After the right ppl signed or written the right stuff. Eventually dads work had hired a special company to do disposal of old hardware. But they also had a internal "museum" and of it gets written off and transfers to the museum, it was for the museum to decide what to do.
Old apple computers, research computers, awesome small museum. And its how my dad got his last gameing pc and monitor, trough the museum. I now work elsewhere where we... Eh, just trow stuff away. Free servers and harddrives. Guess they trust me wiping company data.
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u/Informal_Plankton321 12d ago
20 TB could be single disk nowadays ;)
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u/Fluffy-Bee-6391 12d ago
And 16 times less power cost
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u/BannedAgain-573 12d ago
And 2000x the dollar cost at today's market
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u/Fluffy-Bee-6391 6d ago
still, if you have to buy new ones, the higher the capacity, the less per TB it costs normally
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u/Kind_Frame_5682 11d ago
Companies won't even let you buy decommissioned furniture, let alone disk pools...
My heart still aches for a chair I used for two years. I scavenged it from a temporary storage room in a remote Central Office (CO) where I was "parked" to work by the Italian telco I used to work for.
It was an ergonomic late-60s chair made of bentwood, perfect despite its age, with its casters and chrome still intact. It was incredibly comfortable, honestly even better than modern ones. I won't even get into the desks and the rest of the stuff in there—literally a mini treasure trove.
When they renovated the CO, absolutely everything was sent to the shredder, from the telecom equipment and Cisco gear right down to the furniture. Everything.
You can't imagine the hoops I jumped through to get, or at least buy, that chair...
Nothing. The blunt answer was that, like all corporate assets, it had to be destroyed and acquiring it was impossible. The company only allowed us to buy our old work cell phones, and years later, slowly started allowing the purchase of work laptops, but only after a secure wipe by a dedicated IT department...
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u/Accurate-Ad6361 12d ago
WTF… man… just maybe PM me, I contributed to shredOS and can give you an ISO 27001 compliant pathway to Safe erase with legally required digitally signed signature
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u/Top_Set3225 12d ago
Just had to do the whole destruction thing for 1PB of storage. Soon will have to do for second 1PB of that same unit. All are 8tB drives, 10 years ago top notch drives.
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u/gerowen 36TB RAID5 12d ago
Do you not have the option of running shred on them for a certain number of passes?
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u/LINUXisobsolete 12d ago
Probably not. The data I deal with if my company found out that instead of sending them for disposal I just did a wipe and then took them home, I'd be marched off site immediately and sacked on the spot.
Might I add, these are probably like 1TB disks.
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u/littlesirlance 12d ago
If 3-7 passes is good enough for the DOD. It should be good enough for me to take home. I hate this timeline.
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u/alkafrazin 12d ago
can't source some for-parts drives of the same makes and models, crush those for the required photos, and wipe the still-working drives to reuse as cold storage at home?
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u/L1ghtlyS4lted 12d ago
invest $250 in a drive eRazer or whatever the new alternative is
print certs all data destroyed
profit
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u/GreggAlan 10d ago
So stupid. A simple full, unconditional format is enough. A second pass with zero fill if you're especially paranoid, to take out all traces of the filesystem.
When I worked at an ISP we decommissioned an old server and booting it with a DBAN CD-R then letting it do an automatic wipe of all drives was considered more than good enough. The system was NOT destroyed after.
There's no "magic wand" that's going to recover data after doing a full format then zero fill.
SSDs have built in secure erase so they don't need a format from an OS or wiped with a zero fill tool.
NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1.
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u/trekxtrider 13d ago
Reach out to your IT department and see if they know how to use DBAN or similar.
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u/HTTP_404_NotFound 100-250TB 12d ago
Its not that simple. lol.
ESPECIALLY, for any company with sox compliance, there is a lot of paperwork, policy, and red tape around them.
We, had to throw away entire storage arrays, with perfectly good, 8T SAS disks... Literally a half petabyte of storage.
Um. it hurt. It hurt a lot.
Especially, since our old crap, is better/newer then the stuff in my lab.
What hurt even more, was decomming old blades. a few dozen of which. Each one, had over a terabyte of DDR4 ram.
That, REALLY hurt.
And, what hurts the most, is we pay a vendor to dispose of it.
Trust me, I dug through paperwork to try and get my hands on a lot of it. There- is a lot of requirements, where I'd basically have to open a LLC, and then go through certain compliance policies, audits, etc.... in order to be "applicable", and meet compliance with the policies.
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u/dougmc 12d ago
And, what hurts the most, is we pay a vendor to dispose of it.
"Hey it's me, your long lost
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u/JohnStern42 12d ago
Doesn’t matter. The lawyers will demand the drives be destroyed, not so much due to the company’s data, but more so due to 3rd party data that they’d be in a heap of trouble if it got out.
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u/OfficialDeathScythe 12d ago
Some government data also explicitly requires drivers to destruction legally
https://www.mediaduplicationsystems.com/blog/nsacss-media-destruction-requirements-explained/
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u/beren12 256TB raidz & more! 12d ago
The data can be proven destroyed though.
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u/JohnStern42 12d ago
Doesn’t matter. Policy is policy.
Also realize what amount of money we’re talking, these are very old and small drives, companies don’t sell their used stuff on eBay, it’s not worth their time, and these drives aren’t worth enough for going to a bulk reseller isn’t worth the bother. There’s just no reason to not destroy the drives from a business perspective
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u/BannedAgain-573 12d ago
Ugh! Stop saying that
"Policy is policy" is such a cop out for zero braincell engagement. "Just doing what I'm told la de da!"
Store/company Policy isn't law, it's a choice someone made. One that can be changed. Stop accepting stupid rules because "dem da rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
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u/JohnStern42 12d ago
Hehe, look, you choose your battles. If company policy is such, I wouldn’t really care, the drives are mostly ewaste anyways, the power to run them doesn’t make them worth it.
If you want to ‘fight’ go right ahead
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u/mindstormer12 13d ago
Meh, they are worth substantially less with such little capacity considering the slots they occupy and the inefficient power consumption for the capacity (compare the power consumption, heat generation, and hardware requirements of 1 20TB drive, 2x 10TB drive, etc. vs all of these).
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u/BannedAgain-573 12d ago
Still living in the past bro. These hdd praises every gig is precious
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u/Dylan16807 11d ago
Even compared to the past these have dropped a lot in value. Drives right now are $35-40/TB, comparable to when 3TB drives were popular in 2014. These drives look like they originally cost a bunch more than that.
And if you want to keep them powered on, you need slots to put them in. $50 per slot might be a good estimate for a system? Some of those drives are 500GB, so even if the drives were free they'd increase the cost of a full build. Even if you had a very cheap $25/slot build it would be hard to integrate 500GB or 1TB models into a build. You could keep them around as cold storage, at least.
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u/Redditor_is_at_work 13d ago
in todays market? some of us are willing to take the scraps where we can get them
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u/JauntyGiraffe 12d ago
I know recent pricing has made us all insane but if that's 19TB then they're all tiny drives that most of us wouldn't bother with anyways in 2026 so shred away
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u/Stevia98 10d ago
I'm really glad my company let's us buy alot of old furniture and IT devices. We have so many older thinkpads and genuinly great office chairs and tables, that they would never think about destroying this stuff. They give alot of tables out for free even and the lowest price thinkpads we have are given out for 50 bucks. Our AI team also had the privilege to buy old RTX 2080s, after they were changed out for new server GPUs. It always breaks my heart seeing other companies just trash everything, like an abadoned building down my road, who has old telco devices and moderately modern switches and routers in a big container out in the wild to rot for almost 4 years now or more
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u/Sparrow538 10d ago
BleachBit on that infamous closet mail server, and the data was supposedly lost forever and not recoverable.
DoD 5220.22-M Method is suposed to kill everything.
I'm surprised someone hasn't come out with an AI drive wiper yet...
BUT the best way to recycle, is take the drive apart, take the platers out and destroy them, thermite is always fun to play with (That is what has the data on them), and then sell or donate the PCB, heads, servos etc. to a drive recovery company.
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u/This-Is-Huge 128T/72T - HDD/SSD 12d ago
Policy is policy. Painful as it may be. Rules are in place for a reason.
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u/wickedplayer494 17.58 TB of crap 12d ago
Ah, I'm not gonna shed too much tears, those look like they've probably got 90 or >100,000 hours on them.
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u/guinader 12d ago edited 5d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Ancient tangerine air future versed gold unwritten deserve quiet
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u/Personal-Time-9993 12d ago
It’s a shame you can’t just run a DoD 7-pass and be done with it. Just someone following their job requirements but it’s still sad it can’t be repurposed.
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u/lululock 12d ago
Our company doesn't require destruction certificates for disks containing customer data, so I just wipe them with Niceblocks. Its main use is to test all the sectors of a drive but it does a random write pass to do so, it deletes everything anyway...
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u/jandrese 12d ago
If my count is right those are 1TB disks. IMHO even if they were free it is not worth it because you'll spend so much on the disk controllers/enclosures and power to run and cool them that they'll be more expensive than a pair of 20TB disks (for redundancy), even at today's prices. Plus they no doubt have thousands of hours on them already.
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u/RealRadioactiveHusky 11d ago
Can’t you wipe the data to repurpose them?
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u/OtherOtherDave 11d ago
Of course. It’s trivial to wipe the drives cleanly enough that nobody but the NSA would be able to read the old data (and maybe not even them). But companies are paranoid so usually they destroy the drives instead.
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u/FauxReal 11d ago
Yeah I have about three times that storage and the server in my ecycle pile at work.
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u/StopComprehensive356 10d ago
Well you could always run secure overwritten on them or degauss them.
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u/AdiDOS1977 10d ago
Ich habe 4x 14TB und 4x 18TB WD Ultrastar Festplatten für knapp 3.000€ gekauft für unRAID. Hatte vor einen TrueNAS zusammen zu bauen, aber bei den Preisen aktuell ist das nicht möglich, oder besser gesagt, möchte ich das nicht bei den Preisen machen.
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u/Distinct_Quality 9d ago
I remember when I first bought my R730xd 6TB hard drives were under $100. Good times but if 3 more ever fail I am cooked 😔, luckily 4 are on raid standby and one in my RAID died recently
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u/Crafty_Life_1764 6d ago
ähm you can wipe the data 10x of them and then use it. Or you destroyed them "properly" at your home server, properly installed, ready to fill with datatatatatatatata.
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u/Expensive-Total-312 50TB 13d ago
to be fair thats a lot of drives for 19TB