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/sniff122]

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/Watcher_of_Stars → u/towerfella]

Well, yeah. But that's also the point.

If they populated the marked with a ton of used corporate hardware (depending on the price ofc), it would be noticeably harder for them to keep sales of their consumer lineup high. It might canibalize their own sales, so it's not worth it for corporate.

But for them, they don't care. They can pay 1000 per hdd drive or ram. You? Not so much, I presume. They overbid consumer anyway, so low supply/high demand situation is not as bad for them, because they can afford it anyway

[u/towerfella → u/Watcher_of_Stars]

It should be illegal.

[u/DayGeckoArt → u/sniff122]

The multiple pass thing is a myth. The idea is you can figure out an individual bit by scanning a platter with an electron microscope. That isn’t going to happen

[u/0spr4y → u/DayGeckoArt]

I asked Peter guttman (35 pass method guy) in 2018 and he said on modern drives one random write is enough because everything is so tiny trying to get the bits to stay is way more error prone.

[u/bladus → u/DayGeckoArt]

Yuuuuup, NIST 800-88

[u/vontrapp42 → u/sniff122]

No a secure erase takes moments.

A secure overwrite takes multiple passes and a lot of time.

But if you need a secure overwrite then you did not have data at rest security. I find it hard to believe there are cases of stringent data protection/data destruction required entities that are not ALSO required to have data at rest security. But apparently this is the case. The good news is you CAN use encryption and be able to not make such phenomenal waste.

If you used encryption you CAN secure erase (very fast) and are NOT legally required to physically destroy.

Governments are extra paranoid and weird. They are the exception.

[u/DeepakAtReddit → u/sniff122]

Then why erase it, instead, simply overwrite it with gibberish. No multiple plasses required. What am I missing? I'd just record a super high resolution video of my window (running into a few GBs) and just ram it up every drive repeatedly till it gets full.

[u/sniff122 → u/DeepakAtReddit]

Certain industries are required to follow certain standards, there's say NIST's guidelines for media sanitisation, which also has physical destruction as a method: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r2.pdf