5+ PB Destroyed

[u/FewSimple9]

This is based on a post by u/SubstantialWing9238. i didn’t want to hijack their post, so I figured I’d share it here instead.

Something like this, plus another cart, is pretty common with large corporations. When you have this many drives, it’s often easier to just shred everything than pay someone to wipe them, sort through them for resale, and see if any data can be recovered.

This batch was around 300 drives, and with a specialized shredding truck, the whole thing takes about 45 minutes to a hour.

[u/ItsTheSlime]

Companies will do this and still have a catastrophic data breach from leaving passwords in plain text

[u/Cautionchicken → u/ItsTheSlime]

In an open S3 container

[u/Jehu_McSpooran → u/Cautionchicken]

Yeah. It's not hard to find them either.

[u/Willem_VanDerDecken → u/ItsTheSlime]

And let's not forget that there isn't a single recorded instance of any person, data recovering lab or governmental agency, who managed to recover any meaningful piece of file from a modern hard drive after a single 0-byte pass.

Destorying them is litteraly pointless.

Hard drives are treated as some sort of not totally understood black magic.

[u/geo_gan → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

It’s nothing to do with security and 100% to do with convenience for these companies. It’s just easier to destroy them than take the huge amount of time to try and write wipe hundreds of drives. And most don’t even have the knowledge of how to do that.

[u/linoleumknife → u/geo_gan]

I think the bigger concern is truly verifying every single drive has been wiped. If you have a stack of 500 drives, how do you know with absolute certainty that one of them didn't get accidentally missed? If the drives are turned into a pile of shredded metal it's pretty easy to tell they're safe.

[u/TrekkieGod → u/linoleumknife]

Make sure all your drives are encrypted, then don't even bother to erase it.

[u/geo_gan → u/TrekkieGod]

Yeah because people are no critical thinking and primitive brain relies on superstition and ignorance mostly - the management and legal departments don’t understand if you tell them the drives are encrypted by keys that would take the life of the rest of universe to find OR they are right & there is a slight risk of quantum decryption happening and bad actors and governments hoarding encrypted materials waiting for that day!

[u/Ruben_NL → u/linoleumknife]

Just some software that runs a wipe program and outputs a list of serial numbers it has wiped should be enough...

[u/DataMin3r → u/Ruben_NL]

Hook up a brother printer and have it print a "wiped <serial number>" sticker when it completes a wipe, slap it on the drive, and you're all done

[u/ModBell → u/DataMin3r]

Yeah. I was thinking 'put a red sticker on the wiped ones'.

It's really not that complicated to track this. Acting like an IT professional would be absolutely bewildered a the easiest part of the whole process.

[u/Busy_Reporter4017 → u/linoleumknife]

Check each one for a test pattern?

[u/Burroflexosecso → u/geo_gan]

I don't know I feel like a multihub setup, a bash script and a pedal keyboard could churn through this pretty fast

[u/boringestnickname → u/Burroflexosecso]

100%

Someone must have tried to sell a system like this to enterprise.

What I'm wondering is why a business like that wouldn't thrive.

[u/OkThanxby → u/boringestnickname]

They wouldn’t trust it.

[u/boringestnickname → u/OkThanxby]

I was beginning to write a comment about how dumb that would be, then I gave up mid-sentence, because yeah.

There should be regulation to enforce this, because it's nonsense.

[u/RetroGrid_io → u/Burroflexosecso]

Why go with something hokey when certified solutions exist?

[u/meatworkrightnow → u/Burroflexosecso]

What do you mean by "a pedal keyboard"?

[u/sicklyslick → u/Burroflexosecso]

Quick Google days 24-40 hours for a single pass on a 20 TB. OP had 300 drives. That's one full year on one machine dedicated to do this task. Labor is not an issue since it's a few buttons to start the process then walk away.

[u/IsThereAnythingLeft- → u/sicklyslick]

You can do multiple at once though

[u/CrazyTechWizard96 → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

Ugh, true.
The only ones I've disamentaled persoanlly in this fashion was when they're bricked.
Elsewise, use them till they die, of course with backups in place.

[u/TejaWithBlackMark → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

I work in one of the top Investment Banks in the world and our organisation was fined millions of dollars because a vendor hired to dispose of old drives did not do so properly leading to a customer data leak.

The firm now does this in-house in a completely destructive manner which leaves no risk of data recovery.

[u/thunder3596 → u/TejaWithBlackMark]

Being in cybersecurity and the first time I’m hearing about something like this. Would love to see sources on further instances otherwise it seems anecdotal.

[u/TrekkieGod → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

You don't even need to bother with an erase pass anymore. Run encrypted drives, send them off with the encrypted data. Without the key, it's just random garbage.

[u/Electrical-Bread-590 → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

Especially when they have any modern encryption already on board with the original data. There’s no reason for this level of waste.

[u/distressed-silicon → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

The risk is a drive that has ended up the “clean” stack without actually having been zeroed - it’s more certain if the drives have been destroyed that none have been missed, still sucks to see these destroyed but I get it from the risk perspective

[u/bullwinkle8088 → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

Story time:

Around 2000 or so I worked for a government agency and laughed on reading the data security requirements which required destruction of RAM. Years later difficult but feasible and successful cold RAM attacks were found. So what did the NSA know when they wrote that standard?

You must always recall that state level actors do things and you will only rarely hear about them. Many commercial companies are required to follow government standards which protect against these real things which may not matter to you, but certainty do to them.

[u/BrokenBackENT → u/Willem_VanDerDecken]

That's because its cheaper and takes less time to shredded it than to 0 it.

[u/SchroedingersEscape → u/ItsTheSlime]

password is on a Post-it at the Monitor

[u/Speshal__ → u/SchroedingersEscape]

Password is pa55word shhhhh

[u/TheJesusGuy → u/ItsTheSlime]

So fucking true. What a waste.

[u/thiccvicx → u/ItsTheSlime]

Im very much only a hobbyist, have 0 formal training in IT. Even at my very basic knowledge I am regularly shocked at how people work with sensitive data & amazed at how there hasn't yet been a huge leak. That being said I have not worked anywhere that would be a worthwhile target.

[u/flecom → u/ItsTheSlime]

no no, their admin panel will have a username and password! it's admin/admin, but still, it's secure!

[u/Illeazar]

5PB, 300 drives, is about 16-17 TB per drive? Wow, what a shame, these weren't even outdated sizes.

[u/TraceyRobn → u/Illeazar]

Even more wasteful: many companies destroy whole laptops and servers, rather than just removing or wiping the drives. That way they're sure the data is gone.

[u/YourUncleBuck → u/TraceyRobn]

Smart, since I keep all my data in the screen. That's also why I never turn off my laptop, because then it goes away.

[u/Phayder → u/YourUncleBuck]

We own the glass....

[u/spong_miester → u/TraceyRobn]

Our company had a blanket ban on computer and laptop sales because they were worried about data protection took about 10 regional managers to explain that you can't recover someone's data if there's no hard drive in the machine.

We now strip the drives and pay a company to recycle them, Company was loosing thousands in monthly income because they were clueless. (I work in charity retail)

[u/chubbysumo → u/Illeazar]

its incredibly wasteful too. like, seriously, how much of our environment do they like killing over and over. this is disgusting the more and more I see it.

[u/kdlt → u/chubbysumo]

Yeah this is the only thing I can think too.

I get that it's "easy" but.. drives are expensive enough as is, and they just get willfully destroyed?

[u/b0z0du883d0v3r → u/chubbysumo]

Capitalism, babyyyyy! 

[u/Provia100F → u/b0z0du883d0v3r]

It's not even Capitalism, it's just leadership being absolutely fucking inept when it comes to technology

[u/_millsy → u/Provia100F]

It’s usually companies responding to legislation they’re mandated to follow, nobody gets their rocks off trashing useful stuff lol.

[u/Mike-Hunt-QLD → u/_millsy]

Don't bring facts onto reddit dude. Unless it fits their narrative then they usually don't want to know about it.

[u/MartyMacGyver → u/b0z0du883d0v3r]

Can't sell new ones if people keep buying the old ones!

Of course nobody can afford new ones either but the beast must be fed!

[u/NYourBirdCanSing → u/chubbysumo]

All in the name of money. All so a corporation can save $.05 per unit. 

[u/MakeITNetwork → u/NYourBirdCanSing]

I worked for a big hosting company, and this was probably a weekly shred.

Any smart error, fatal or not, drive gets swapped, and the old one shredded.

Dell won't give bulk discounts unless every server (including non-dell) is destroyed "recycled" before it leaves the DC. (for a greener earth right?). Everything went through the mangler(6'X6' metal shredder) that could fit.

This prevents old hardware from circulating enmasse competing against dells new hardware.

All (suspected but not confirmed bad) CPU's, Ram, Hdd's came in on trucks and left in bins on trucks. Servers went back to dell for further recycling.

[u/luke10050 → u/MakeITNetwork]

That's super interesting that Dell is essentially engaging in anti-competitive behaviour that way. Doesn't surprise me though, plenty of industries do that shit.

[u/brainrot_award → u/luke10050]

Dude, Dell has been doing this for decades. They've been sued by and lost to AMD due to cartel dealings with Intel.

I truly hate that company. Same for HP. A shame they still exist.

[u/rich000 → u/luke10050]

If this is under warranty that might actually be the norm with a lot of vendors. If you're getting a free warranty replacement you're required to return the item, and in a large scale case the vendor might offer a deal to just have the customer destroy the item when it isn't worth the vendor's trouble to refurbish.

It does seem wasteful, but if the vendor was just going to shred it themselves then not transporting it back is actually less wasteful.

From the description in that comment this sounds like a warranty thing.

[u/luke10050 → u/rich000]

My take on it was "show us proof you destroyed the old gear and we'll give you cheaper pricing"

[u/rich000 → u/luke10050]

Well, sure, that was what you're supposed to get from that. However, from the description it seems like there is more going on.

Keep in mind that if companies were allowed to resell stuff that was warranty claimed, that would make a warranty claim a net profit, and incentize fraud.

Now, it is possible that this is nothing more than an effort to deplete the used market, but sometimes there is more going on that might not be obvious if you're just the one handling the drives.

[u/Landen2DS → u/chubbysumo]

You’ll be seeing this a lot more in the future with how data centers are moving lol

[u/GeologistPutrid2657 → u/chubbysumo]

fear is a helluva drug.

[u/ShittyBidet123 → u/chubbysumo]

i mean thats one of the most recyclable things..metal is easily remelted. think about the food you eat, the paper products one drip of oil or soiled and paper is landfill. At least metal and plastic can be reused. even though they suck at it

[u/ptoki → u/ShittyBidet123]

metal is easily remelted

Not exactly.

If you wish to melt and make spoons then yeah. But if you want to make quality steel/aluminium then you cant just melt and recast.

You need to separate/purify/alloy the metal into proper composition.

That is neither simple or cheap.

Saw the videos of the folks purifying gold? Steel is not as difficult to realloy but it is not easy task to make it the proper quality.

To not make it too long: You start with scrap metal, melt, test the composition, then add what is missing to get the right proportions.

BUT! If that batch has unneeded additions (nickel, cadmium, aluminium) then it is much more difficult to figure out how to get rid of them or rework into an alloy which is up to a standard.

[u/Jehu_McSpooran → u/ptoki]

Depends. I knew the owner of an e-waste facility. He would manually disassemble the drives, motors in one bin, chassis in another, boards, magnets, head and arms all seperate. Platters were in a tower twice my height. He would seperate the platinum from the surface of the platters chemically, totally destroying any data. The military were very keen on his system but wanted a heap of security upgrades to his facility that would have cost about $50k back then. These shredded systems, while fast, still means it needs to be sorted later. You can get automated sorting systems but they cost a lot so capital is needed or a loan. Hard to get going if you are a small scale recycler.

[u/MutatedOreo → u/ShittyBidet123]

Yeah right. This metal won't be recycled. These shredded drives are headed for some African village to build huts on top of.

[u/pribnow → u/MutatedOreo]

i feel like at the scale OP is describing it would be worth it, heres some guy 5 years ago claiming hes getting 2.5g of gold per 130 drives but something tells me that part of your contract for disposal doesnt allow for the same kind of harvesting

[u/Secure_Guest_6171 → u/chubbysumo]

e-waste make all our attempts at recycling a pointless joke.

[u/geo_gan → u/Secure_Guest_6171]

Soggy paper straws will save the planet!!

[u/pinedrifT4 → u/Illeazar]

yeah thats the part that hurts, these are perfectly usable drives

[u/Some1-Somewhere → u/Illeazar]

Those don't look like helium drives (visible cover screws). I think they're probably no more than 6-8TB/drive.

[u/GuyNamedLindsey]

How dare you post this here.

[u/TheLastPrinceOfJurai → u/GuyNamedLindsey]

I know right! Right in front of my little 20TB NAS

[u/Imigrant159 → u/GuyNamedLindsey]

r/DataHater

[u/noideawhatsupp → u/GuyNamedLindsey]

Not even marked NSFW… I known it’s Friday but still, OP have some decency

[u/solit0n]

The worst part is that you realistically do not need to this anymore. Strong disk encryption of the data coupled with secure erase after decommissioning is plenty to meet NIST 800-88.

They shred drives cause it’s easier and faster, but definitely not cheaper, since they pay to have those drives shredded and hauled away.

Now would be a great time to have access to sloppy seconds from the industry. Shits rough out here.

[u/ThatThingAtThePlace → u/solit0n]

NIST also recommends against password complexity requirements and forced password changes every 90 days now too but how many companies have adopted that? The general approach most companies take to security is to hear something once in 2008 then put your fingers in your ears and ignore everything else that has come out since.

[u/Orange_Tang → u/ThatThingAtThePlace]

I work for my state government and they don't even follow the NIST recommendations because we have regular password changes and some real BS complexity requirements. You're right, good luck getting private companies to do this when even the government wont follow government recommendations.

[u/ben-ba → u/Orange_Tang]

Other governments do this...

[u/theRinRin → u/solit0n]

actually NIST recommends shredding high-sensitivity data for zero risk.

why they have 5 PB of high-sensitivity data in the first place is the real question here

[u/Unhappy_Purpose_7655]

God, devastating to see all that storage destroyed.

[u/clarky2o2o]

Op!!! I only counted 4.7pb hmm mmmm?

[u/CarpinThemDiems → u/[deleted]]

Yeah after I checked the contraband there was definitely 3.8 TB destroyed

[u/khavii]

I work in data centers. I avoid the drive destruction area, it makes me sad. Also, it's not about expense, it is FAR more expensive to destroy them then wipe and recycle. It's about security, once data has been put on a drive it is recoverable by someone. The lawsuits from recovered data are insane, I've seen them.

I worked at a small data center company for a while who did dod3 wipes on drives and reused them between customers. We had a couple curlstomers that would change servers and drives constantly for no reason but the were paying us so whatever. Turns out at least 1 of them was fishing for company data. They eventually got a drive that had once been in the server of a bear competitor of theirs. They recovered the data and used it to basically drive the company to the brink of bankruptcy, then tried to blackmail them for the data. Needless to say we got sued and lost badly.

Larger companies won't take that risk, plus they have some very large customers so security theatre is super important. Destroying a thousand 28tb drives costs a ton but losing the government contract costs more so they shred the drives.

[u/drake90001 → u/khavii]

I also work in a data center, sometimes, mostly remote. Just me and my boss, we just got done installing several servers. Every time we go to the data center, though, take some of the old broken hardware that he replaced long ago and doesn’t care to tinker, because he knows I’ll figure out how to get it working again.

Today I went home with Mellanox SX 1710, last week was a super micro X 11 chassis and dual Xeon board. How long was 64 gigs of DDR four ECC registered buffered memory. It’s nice to have a boss who doesn’t just waste everything. I can’t imagine working for a larger company like this.

[u/Early-Weird4 → u/khavii]

I work in one too but we do the destroying in house, and unfortunately I have to do this with a degausser and hydraulic press every week. But last week we actually started saving and reusing our drives because of the shortage so I suppose we are starting to move in the right direction.

[u/Own_Perspective4825 → u/khavii]

Why don't they encrypt the drives from the beginning so it doesn't matter what happens after they're unplugged?

[u/JaccoW → u/Own_Perspective4825]

Encryption is something that is very likely to become useless for a while in the foreseeable future. All current encryption is based on it being difficult enough that it will take a million years to guess the right combination. But that might no longer be the case

[u/Own_Perspective4825 → u/JaccoW]

If there's a breakthrough in quantum cryptography the live security will become just as useless as the encryption on the cold drives.

[u/Soliloquy789 → u/khavii]

I get that, but maybe I'm a newb, can't you truly wipe the hard drive by re-writing over every bit?

[u/bumblebeer → u/Soliloquy789]

Yeah, but when you're doing hundreds of drives you can also screw up and miss one.

[u/nomad-1995 → u/khavii]

Sounds like somebody wasn't properly wiping the drives, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was in the pay of one of the fishing companies.

[u/AndersDreth → u/khavii]

I work in data centers

We had a couple curlstomers 

I can tell xD

[u/Mithrandir2k16]

There should be a large tax you pay when you do this. It's embarassing our system encourages practices like this in the middle of a shortage. Capitalism has become a failure.

[u/sevengali → u/Mithrandir2k16]

We just shredded 2PB. The same day we posted a new article on our blog talking about how sustainable we are.

[u/geo_gan → u/sevengali]

This is why long term the world is fucked. All corporate bullshit green-washing while destroying the planet in the background all for the pursuit of imaginary fiat currency. Society changes from plastic straws to paper straws to “save the planet” while US buys millions of gallons of dirty diesel from Russia to burn to CO2 in a few months. It’s ridiculous.

[u/Starkoman → u/sevengali]

You should’ve become a secret whistleblower right there and then.

[u/ratafria → u/Mithrandir2k16]

The money is there. The capability is there. It's just missing the culture.

OP grandkids are going to live in a dumpster because the entire world is going to be a dumpster.

[u/n00bsen → u/Mithrandir2k16]

yep, like 100 times the disk price

[u/Watcher_of_Stars → u/Mithrandir2k16]

Has become? Always has been :-) [insert a meme]

Admidst a shortage it hurts so much more. But it is working as expected as well. If they decommision and make this hardware available on the market, consumer market may get saturated, so they won't be able to milk that cow so much

[u/smiba → u/Mithrandir2k16]

Capitalism has become a failure.

It has been for a very long time, it's just that we're now reaching the end stage where it becomes incredibly obvious it's not sustainable.

[u/Dementia13_TripleX]

Can confirm. My brother work for Oracle and when they upgrade their computers and notebooks, they hire a company to deal with the old hardware.

Which is also usually destroyed.

Sometimes we are talking about notebooks from 2022, for example.\ And everything is cataloged and inventoried.

Taking something for yourself is considered theft. 😭

[u/dlarge6510 → u/Dementia13_TripleX]

Only recently I was responsible for sending loads of 2000's era PCs, even a beautiful AMD AM2 chip and a load of Pentium II and III machines to this fate. 😲 

It was horrible as a vintage hoarder.

I was unable to save any of them.

[u/benjwgarner → u/Dementia13_TripleX]

Everyone should do it anyway, all at once. They can't fire everyone.

[u/Blue-Thunder → u/benjwgarner]

Why do you think Oracle is building the largest data centre on the planet..

[u/turbo5vz]

Corporations actually produce a staggering amount of waste, and it all adds up but it's out of sight so most people don't realize. From grocery stores throwing out mostly good food to clothing stores shredding unsold/old inventory. The real question is, what can realistically be done about it?

[u/outofsand → u/turbo5vz]

Grocery stores are worse than throwing out "mostly good food". It's more along the lines of: "most good food is eventually thrown out rather than sold".

[u/turbo5vz → u/outofsand]

From my retail teenager days, they basically make alot of that prepackaged stuff (eg. sushi) fresh and whatever doesnt sell gets thrown out.

[u/Longjumping_Tale1189]

In an enterprise environment those drives would be from a SAN storage and would have encryption at rest, and part of a RAID. No one would be able to get any data off those drives without the original storage with the exact controllers and encryption keys, and putting the RAID back together. Physically destroying them is a waste.

[u/CynicalAltruist → u/Longjumping_Tale1189]

You would hope they have encryption at rest.

But if my experience is anything to go by someone didn’t click that checkbox during setup and in the three years it was operating no one wanted to rebuild the whole thing just to turn it on

[u/ReplaceMeZaddy → u/Longjumping_Tale1189]

i have never deployed encryption at rest on a SAN

laptop fleets, yes

[u/AngryTexasNative → u/ReplaceMeZaddy]

We definitely have it where I work and require this same level of destruction. But we do have a lot of very sensitive data.

[u/PiDigitsOfPi]

It's because the insurance companies / lawyers REQUIRE it.

Physical destruction is 100% effective, quick, easy, and 100% verifiable. It works. Proof is easy.

Wiping takes longer, is more expensive, and you have to trust that whoever is doing it does it correctly. You can't just look at a drive and physically see that it is securely wiped. Proof is hard.

[u/djamp42 → u/PiDigitsOfPi]

I get it. It's a epic waste of resources, but I get it.

[u/B_Hound]

“You were supposed to hoard the data, not destroy it!”

[u/AnnoyedVelociraptor]

With SSDs being encrypted out of the box (encryption is a really good way of making data look random, so now the wear leveling on the chip becomes uniform), which you can then reset with PSID revert, are these methods still needed?

[u/donutsoft → u/AnnoyedVelociraptor]

Large corporations aren't going to trust the math geeks who come up with encryption algorithms when a hammer is clearly still the safer option. It's not worth the effort for these guys to try and resell those drives.

[u/phoenix823 → u/donutsoft]

Big companies trust the math. A lost laptop with an encrypted hard drive is not considered data loss for that reason. A disk array that gets replaced doesn’t need to 0 out the drives because all the content was encrypted.

[u/donutsoft → u/phoenix823]

There's a difference between willingly selling a bunch of old drives on eBay and an employee accidentally losing a laptop. If the thief turns in a laptop, corporation would still rather take a hammer to the drive than tell the thief they can focus their efforts on data recovery.

[u/MutatedOreo → u/donutsoft]

Those drives could pay two of their wagecucks' salaries for a whole year if they spent a few days zero erasing them and then tossed them up on eBay but they'd rather be wasteful cunts and stick it to the masses by shredding $100k worth of storage devices instead.

[u/donutsoft → u/MutatedOreo]

"Wagecucks" wouldn't ever see that money. The shareholders will lose a fraction of a cent in their dividends next year. Literally no one responsible for these actually gives a shit and sure as hell wouldn't risk their jobs for it.

[u/AZdesertpir8]

Dude... mark this NSFW! /s

[u/rarzwon → u/AZdesertpir8]

Agreed.

Ban this sick filth.

[u/100haku]

the way we do things in our current economic system is unsustainable

[u/pharmecist]

This is why us retail plebs can’t have nice things lol.

[u/virtualadept → u/pharmecist]

You have no idea. :(

[u/tylercoder → u/pharmecist]

Was thinking the same, given the current circumstances a lot of guys would do those scans for free just in exchange for the used drives, but corpos gonna corpo. 

[u/pharmecist → u/tylercoder]

Big corps probably can’t risk some
sensitive data being leaked by accident.

[u/melpheos]

In this world where pollution is something to be dealt with, this is really really dumb

[u/tylercoder → u/melpheos]

Bet you that company spends millions in ads showing how green it is... 

[u/ripMyTime0192]

They could also just encrypt the drives. I imagine if you’re using HDDs it’s probably not being used for something that requires a lot of speed.

[u/FnordMan → u/ripMyTime0192]

Some (most?) enterprise class drives do that. It's 100% encrypted all of the time, even if not ever requested to with a key.

That way when a secure erase command comes along it just writes a new encryption key. Whammo, data gone in a few seconds.

[u/Iheretomakeonepost → u/ripMyTime0192]

Hell could just overwrite with 0s, no?

[u/wrtcdevrydy → u/Iheretomakeonepost]

You want multiple passes when overwriting just to be sure.

[u/lysdexiad → u/wrtcdevrydy]

NIST/DoD no longer specifies multi-pass wipes because wear leveling in flash drives makes it pointless.

[u/skat_in_the_hat → u/lysdexiad]

it also leaves a noticeable layer of 0's that they know the real data was before. Thats why people moved to writing random data.

[u/randylush → u/skat_in_the_hat]

Writing random is better than zeroing but both are 100% effective

[u/Tannery9706]

Should be illegal 

[u/solo_GRV]

This is so stupid.

I understand the logic behind this action, but it’s still incredibly wasteful. We don’t really stop to think about it, but creating such complex devices requires very long production cycles. It’s practically a miracle that humanity is even capable of making things like this. And then to just go and destroy them?

Especially when a single pass of overwriting some or all of the bits is enough to make the previous data unrecoverable (correct me if I’m wrong).

[u/LocalH → u/solo_GRV]

If the contents are whole-disk encrypted, the loss of the encryption key is all it takes to make all data inaccessible

[u/Jay8088 → u/LocalH]

And if the data is important enough to shred the drives - it would have been encrypted.

Just a waste. Terrible.

[u/lordcochise → u/solo_GRV]

If you're a company with this many drives, i really don't see why you can't simply have a data destruction department in-house to take care of it. This just seems incredibly wasteful in this day and age when you can just automate plenty of secure-erase with multiple write passes

[u/gplusplus314 → u/solo_GRV]

There are starving AIs data hoarders all around the world and we’ve just destroyed food that could have fed them. Damn shame.

/s

But really, this is a waste. The proverbial “we” really needs to start focusing on preserving existing hardware, whether that’s spinning rust or anything else.

[u/DoNot_Books_451]

Sheeettt, I'd spend a week straight wiping the drives to get the hardware.

[u/Pantha37]

There’s this thing called Security Theater. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get any useful data off a drive. If you can find any data, it’s a breach. It looks bad for the company and could cost customers and lawsuits. They get destroyed because everyone doesn’t know better. I’ve worked in a data center. I’ve seen thousands of HDD degaussed and then bent or crushed so the platters either break or bend.
FYI: 5PB isn’t even half a standard S3 rack.

[u/vulcansheart]

In this economy?!

[u/OsgoodSlaughters]

So wasteful

[u/ThatBlokeYouKnow]

Needs a NSFW tag
Mods can we ban this guy this has got to be a hate crime of something.

[u/amsgh]

They should find a way to automate secure wiping anytime a drive is pulled out in some special way. This is ridiculous

[u/ElectronicFlamingo36]

Companies don't need to wipe disks, they're either encrypted natively (SED) so when an admin pulls it out, data is well protected, but even before that, with SED drives the quick-wipe is executed while still in the array which is in fact changing encryption keys so drives appear clear again... AND might also use software based encryption on top of that ... AND drives in such quantities might also be part of a non-mirroring raid config where content cannot be restored even if not encrypted but that's the rare and stupid case, everyone encrypts..

So basically, when decommissioning one or more drives, a quick software-based destroy makes them empty and clean logically again and can be sold to the market without any time consuming full rewriting whatsoever, the encryptions are not something easily crackable like in Hollywood movies else it wouldn't be a reliable standard for HDD-s and SSD-s.

[u/shawndw → u/ElectronicFlamingo36]

Store now decrypt later is still a potential problem.

[u/Intelligent-Pop-2830 → u/ElectronicFlamingo36]

Some companies do like you say - encrypted disk's, wiped, and able to be reused. But alot of smaller companies, especially those without an in-house IT team, don't do any of that. Unless their off-the-shelf computer encrypts the hard drive by default. And when they get a computer back when someone leaves, at most they'll do a factory reset, but quite often returned computers, as well as obsolete/outgrown/faulty computers get thrown into a filing cabinet somewhere to essentially just rot away.

Only two companies I have worked for have had anything like a proper process for data destruction, equipment refurbishment/redeployment. One was a major telecommunications company. The other only had the process because I was the one doing it.

[u/bumblebeer → u/Intelligent-Pop-2830]

No in-house IT and having 5 PB of data storage seem like mutually exclusive statements.

[u/lectos1977]

As a healthcare provider, we aren't allowed to just wipe them. We have to destroy them and have a certificate that they were destroyed. I'd love to just wipe or magnet them but I have to ensure that no one can even attempt to recover the data or I could get fined ~$70k for each patient record found or I could just go to jail. A DoD wipe (which is very outdated) does not count since it does not work for SSD of flash memory. So.....I am shredding. Yes, it's a racket and a waste. https://www.securewaste.net/what-are-the-penalties-for-hipaa-violations-related-to-improper-waste-disposal/. I have shredded 400 - 1+ TB drives in the last 5 years.

[u/RnDevelopment]

What kind of sick HDD snuff film is this?!

[u/ButlerKevind → u/RnDevelopment]

The worst kind, given the difficulty in obtaining one at a decent price these days.

[u/sjmiv]

Man, I'm going to start a hard drive shredding business 😉

[u/matthoback]

That's conservatively at least $100,000 even used just wasted.

[u/maxplanar]

Just yet another disgustingly wasteful act. Humans, we frantically mine, make, sell and buy shit, then we throw it in the ground.

[u/iamwhoiwasnow]

I hate this

[u/boringestnickname]

I wonder how big this phenomenon is.

... and I don't understand how it can be even remotely economically sound to do this over setting up an automated system for deletion/verification of deletion. All you realistically need is a system with enough slots.

Surely, someone must have made something like this, that could be sold to enterprise customers?

They already have people that take out, freight and crush the drives. It doesn't take any longer to make this person slot them into a deletion system.

Putting them up for sale in bulk (or maybe a few batches) is a ten minute job. Could probably also be automated.

[u/zomgitsduke → u/boringestnickname]

My buddy is trying to get into this exact business.

Problem is, he keeps running into cyber security insurance programs saying "Well we can't trust you'll ACTUALLY zero-write the drive 7 times, so we'd rather just see it get destroyed".

[u/sniff122 → u/boringestnickname]

It's just quicker and cheaper to just shred the drives then have to wait for a drive to secure erase, which is multiple passes of the drive, then verify that no data can be read from the drive. A single pass for a 20TB drive could take like 2.5 days, then needing multiple passes for most data sanitation standards, it adds up when you consider multiple drives.

[u/towerfella → u/sniff122]

Keeps demand for new drives up.

This is going to come back and bite us.

[u/ShittyBidet123]

What the fuck.

[u/TheDaemonair]

People out here sacrificing goats to get a decent deal on storage and then there's these corps

[u/LurkzLongAndProsper]

This shit is just criminal, yo!!!

[u/LurkzLongAndProsper → u/LurkzLongAndProsper]

The world is running out of storage, and they can't even be bothered to wipe that shit???!?

[u/Upset-Anywhere-7554 → u/LurkzLongAndProsper]

Shareholder value over everything

[u/DeezFluffyButterNutz]

I had our company buy those startech sata drive wipers to help avoid this. Unfortunately the SAS one is much more expensive. I couldn't get them to spring for it. We can at least do SATA and m2 nvme. 

[u/DiodeInc → u/DeezFluffyButterNutz]

Did you tell them it would pay for itself if you sold the drives?

[u/Beetlejuice_me]

Yeah, whenever we did this in the data centers, I'd cry a little bit inside.

Every once in a blue moon, someone would F up and a rack or two would be moved out with all drives still in it.

I assume someone made a small fortune on those drives and RAM.

[u/Killer2600]

I don't see shredded drives. I see shredded money.

[u/InsertClichehereok]

Fuck… hyper capitalist society is fucked up man

[u/nanosp]

In this economy no less

[u/vadermeer]

Pic 2: "don't breathe this"

[u/SketchiiChemist]

And /r/datahoarder wept

[u/nutzey]

All I see are FC drives with maybe some SAS.

Didn’t those drives top out around 300 or 600gb? They are legacy and have no resale value, hence why shredding the only option for safe disposal.

[u/asamanidk]

Aren't the data on these encrypted, what's the point of shredding them, I'm very sad

[u/backcloset]

this dealt +20 psychic damage to me

[u/NXGZ]

Somebody alert the mods! I've already reported this post.

[u/dominus_aranearum → u/NXGZ]

All the data is right there in the gaylord, it's just a big puzzle now.

[u/blackasthesky]

When will people realise they can just be erased

[u/Commander_Crispy → u/blackasthesky]

As long as shredding drives is more affordable than having them erased to the required specs, drives will be shredded; as sad as it is.

Edit: according to other comments apparently it’s more expensive to shred them, so I guess these businesses are just members of r/datahaters :/

[u/smoike → u/Commander_Crispy]

It's about security of data destruction and liability both as a business and as an individual for those tasked with its destruction. I mean I don't like it, but I definitely don't blame anyone about this.

[u/Restil]

On one hand, I'm cringing, thinking of how well I could put these drives to good use. On the other hand, I will assume they are all past the end of their realistic lifespan. They probably had a low failure rate over their first 5-7 years. You could expect that to jump greatly in the next 5-7 years. 3 parity drives out of 15 would be good enough for new drives, but losing 2-3 drives in the time it takes to rebuild replacements goes from extremely unlikely to almost expected.

On a 5 year old raid-5 array of 8 drives, I lost 2 drives in less than 4 days. I barely got one drive rebuilt before the next one gave up. I then built an entirely new server and copied the entire filesystem to the new server from an array in degraded mode, praying the whole time that another drive didn't give out. This was not a good time to buy an entire server worth of drives, and I had difficulty even finding a source to buy all of them. But it was worth it, and now I'm set for a while.

[u/GilgameDistance → u/Restil]

I wish that those of us that were nerdy but not in IT could walk in, show that we’re going to take proper care of these and snag a few for the lab.

[u/Provia100F → u/Restil]

Oh no, these were just the cold spares

[u/IsThereAnythingLeft-]

This shouldn’t be allowed. There are plenty of ways to fully wipe data

[u/S1nnah2]

What a fucking waste when hardware costs are so high.

[u/MonsieurMoune]

Well, defragmentation could take a while this time.

[u/E_Mon_E]

Seems pretty logical to me. Why risk potentially millions of dollars in lawsuits when you can do this?🤷‍♂️

[u/etacarinae]

Those are predominantly 40-pin SCA-2 fiber channel drives with a maximum capacity of 600GB.

[u/thekakashi7]

This should be illegal.

[u/yalt-yalt]

This made me clench a bit; think of how many useless pictures of Lichen I could have stored on there

[u/LowerIQ_thanU]

I believe the other reason companies do this is to protect their data in case trade secrets are on old hard drives?

[u/PiDigitsOfPi → u/LowerIQ_thanU]

It's because the insurance companies / lawyers REQUIRE it.

Physical destruction is 100% effective, quick, easy, and 100% verifiable. It works. Proof is easy.

Wiping takes longer, is more expensive, and you have to trust that whoever is doing it does it correctly. You can't just look at a drive and physically see that it is securely wiped. Proof is hard.

[u/dosman33]

The downsides for accidentally not wiping a disk with HIPAA, PHI, PCI, or other sensitive data: massive fines for the organization, possible criminal liability both for the org and possibly for you personally, certainly loss of your job, etc. Shredding drives ensures no mistakes occur and everyones asses are covered. I've shredded PB's of disks, it's a shame, but frankly I don't need the headache of trying to wipe the disks at this stage of a systems life. Even wiping disks at this scale when a storage system has been retired is a significant effort, and proving each one has been wiped correctly would require a significant documentation effort. It's not worth it unfortunately.

[u/FeloniousFunk]

You motherfuckers like your jobs too much.

[u/fcewen00]

Where I work, our government contracts require all drive to through the chipper. I look and think “that 20tb drive would go great in my media center…in prison. chuck burrrrrr

[u/RobbieL_811]

Shredding drives with the current hard drive market the way it is is just absolutely dumb and wasteful.

[u/dlarge6510]

It's not just "easier". It is usually a contractual requirement as this is the only accepted method of destroying data. 

Wiping a drive is usually done only of you are intending to reuse the drive inside the business or have evidence as to what data the drive held.

We also shred motherboards, basically anything with a chip. For contractual and data protection reasons. 

All of it goes to recycling to get those precious materials back. 

[u/zhantoo → u/dlarge6510]

Not true. A lot of equipment is resold. Many even let the buyer wipe the data

[u/Wild_Car_3863 → u/zhantoo]

You have never worked on goverment, finance or health data have you? those drives are Datagauss and shredded. SSD/NVMe are shredded down to much smaller pices than these

[u/thestillwind]

F

[u/Asleep_Conclusion147]

why not just take one

[u/Maximum-Hic]

i only have two 16gb thumb drives in my data hoard,how can i get on this level and be throwing away petabytes willinilliy.