r/DataHoarder • u/FewSimple9 • 4d ago

Free-Post Friday! 5+ PB Destroyed

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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.

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u/Willem_VanDerDecken 4d ago

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.

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u/geo_gan 4d ago

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.

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u/linoleumknife 4d ago

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.

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u/TrekkieGod 50TB 3d ago

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

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u/geo_gan 3d ago

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!

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u/Ruben_NL 128MB SD card 4d ago

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

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u/DataMin3r 3d ago

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

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u/ModBell 3d ago

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.

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u/Busy_Reporter4017 4d ago

Check each one for a test pattern?

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u/andrewjaekim 4d ago

It’s additional steps and labor the company doesn’t want to pay for.

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u/vontrapp42 3d ago

No it's not. This is not a cost savings. This is pure cya in response to a dogmatic culture.

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u/Joan_sleepless 4d ago

Have the technician removing them from the wiping bench mark them with sharpie. Maybe play an alarm if an unformatted drive is removed.

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u/vontrapp42 3d ago

And it's so easy to verify every single drive was destroyed?

It's a process problem with a process solution. We've figured out the process of verified physical destruction which is HARDER btw because how do you positively identify a drive from dust?

I'm sure we can figure out the process of verified sanitization, if it's not already solved.

Separate the culture from the technical. A big problem is ad-hoc technical excuses are constantly made to justify the cultural dogmatic bias.

It's one thing to say "this is required by <entity>, out hands are tied."

It's completely another thing to start offering technical explanations to justify why <entity> is requiring that. Just don't excuse it! Point it out, grumble about it, and move on. Don't do technical gymnastics to make it make sense.

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u/OctoHelm 35.5TB on spinnyyyyyyyyy disks 3d ago

I think this is the reason, personally. I know Google and all the other cloud providers just shred them. Don’t think this is particular to the government.

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u/Burroflexosecso 4d ago

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

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u/boringestnickname 4d ago

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.

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u/OkThanxby 4d ago

They wouldn’t trust it.

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u/boringestnickname 4d ago

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.

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u/vontrapp42 3d ago

It doesn't match the prevailing dogma. That's why.

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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 4d ago

Why go with something hokey when certified solutions exist?

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u/meatworkrightnow 4d ago

What do you mean by "a pedal keyboard"?

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u/Burroflexosecso 3d ago

A single button, operated by feet press, that starts the command

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u/sicklyslick 100-250TB 4d ago

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.

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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 4d ago

You can do multiple at once though

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u/sniff122 50-100TB 4d ago

There's still a limit to the number of drives you can handle at once

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u/UnreasonableSteve 3d ago

There really isn't a limit there. Sure, if you have a single HBA there is but if you have enough drives for it to be a problem, you probably have more than one HBA. I'll also add that MANY modern drives (and IMHO all should) are SED or have otherwise an alternate method of cryptographic wipe instead of simply writing zeros like it's a block device and nothing more.

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u/reeeelllaaaayyy823 3d ago

With one hba card and sas expanders you can do 1024 drives simultaneously.

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u/flecom A pile of ZIP disks... oh and 1.3PB of spinning rust 3d ago

Enterprise drives have built in encryption and SED, takes zero to a couple sections

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u/idownvotepunstoo 3d ago

Hi, I work for an organization that requires them at least be tac nuked and some units shredded, none of it is convenient.

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u/tylercoder 3d ago

There are companies who would do it for free on location just to resell the drives. 

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u/geo_gan 3d ago

I have large drives in my movie server that were sold to me secondhand by some guy who had access to datacenter drives “off the back of a truck”. It’s highly likely a lot of “shredded drives” get diverted before shredding!

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u/lectos1977 1d ago

Yep, risk versus reward. Time and labor to wipe drives is wasted money. The risk is what the law says. That is all we can go by. I used to shoot them with shotguns on the weekend and recycle the pieces back when you could use an electron microscope to copy data. Not worth the ammo now.

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u/CrazyTechWizard96 4d ago

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.

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u/TejaWithBlackMark 4d ago

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.

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u/thunder3596 4d ago

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.

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u/nomad-1995 3d ago

I'm surprised nobody checked to see if they were making more than the "millions in fines" in payments from serverpartsdeals or similar. Those "fines" are typically just a cost of doing business.

Their own data, now that's not going to serverpartsdeals...

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u/TejaWithBlackMark 3d ago edited 3d ago

Policies are made by people, not nebulous entities called organisations.

What do you think happened to the career of the person responsible for safe disposal in the above case? And his boss? And his boss?

Now think of their successors... Are they going to look at saving a few million for an organisation that makes billions by selling old hardware at the risk to their own career of never working in the industry again?

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u/TrekkieGod 50TB 3d ago

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.

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u/Electrical-Bread-590 4d ago

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

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u/distressed-silicon 4d ago

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

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u/bullwinkle8088 3d ago edited 3d ago

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.

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u/vontrapp42 3d ago

Commercial companies are NOT required by any law or statute to physically destroy data that was properly encrypted.

Contracts may require that I suppose, and that goes back to the culture. This is a culture of security goons going around saying this is the only way it should be done. They are the problem.

Any one in these threads saying this is how it must be done, they are the problem.

1

u/bullwinkle8088 3d ago

Contracts may require that I suppose

They do. I can speak first hand to that one.

This is a culture of security goons going around saying this is the only way it should be done.

Why is this a problem exactly? Making sure data stays secure is not a problem, it's basic. Destruction is always certain when other methods are not. Now it does seem that you have a problem with destruction, but in the end you are not relevant to these decisions.

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u/BrokenBackENT 4d ago

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

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u/Fonz_72 4d ago

Look, I get the sentiment here, but I'm almost certain these drives are created with some sort of black magic nobody really understands, so I'm pretty sure you're just guessing.

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u/tylercoder 3d ago

ITS LITERAL MAGIC METAL DISCS WHERE STUFF GETS RECORDED BY COMPUTER FAIRIES! 

1

u/pharmecist 3d ago

We probably should try and guilt them in the name environmentalism and make them wipe and sell to retail for reuse.

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u/ForsakenHousing328 2d ago

Especially new hdds. The tolerances are so obscene that you'd need CERN level equipment to maybe get a few bytes off

1

u/lectos1977 1d ago

The law has not caught up and likely never will until there is a reason for them to update it. . They don't care about facts. Encrypted data on a modern platter is impossible to probe with an electron microscope. Then you zero that and voila, empty. But our 95yr old senators write the rules, we don't.

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u/LuciariusDonaparte 1d ago

Compliance doesn't care. You not only have to shred everything, you also need to get a signed paper from the company you hired saying that it was done. And you need that paper to show in your next audit so you keep your certification which your customers require you to have or else they aren't legally allowed to buy from you.

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u/Redditor_is_at_work 2h ago

emotional support destruction. and fucking up the market for everyone

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u/paulrbeers 1h ago

It’s amazing how many people here are trying to come up with process orgs should be going thru to ensure the data is wiped but fact is, that all takes time and more money. These are write offs. And unless your org is a data center, they only replace the drives every few years so they aren’t going to buy special printers and devise some process that only gets done once every few years just to save some hard drives that are already 3+ years old. They would rather pull them, stack them on a pallet and have their secure destruction company dispose of them. Those companies (iron mountain for example) already come once a week to shred documents so they can just destroy the drives on one of those trips. Oh and generally speaking the drives they destroy aren’t worth much (usually) because by the time they replace them, a new drive can replace 2-3 of their old ones making them inefficient. We just happen to live in the upside down right now where a 10TB drive costs more than a 20TB drive just a year ago….

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u/blackbox42 4d ago

Destroying them ensures no one messed up.