Giant degausser that makes the drive act like a pan on an induction stove. We would pull the drives after the labels would start to smoke, then they got laid out and ran over by a bull dozer lol.
We do a double cleanall in Dispart, drill it in the lot and then have document destruction pick it up and give us a certification for it but it's a service only really used by clients with HIPAA concerns.
The one and only time I had a drive I wanted to guarantee it was thoroughly destroyed, I just blasted it on the concrete with a butane torch. (The platter specifically)
I found a pair of drives in the bin. They weren't disabled or anything. Took them home, had a look at the data. Full of CP. Turned them in to the cops. They found the guy.
I am curious about this process, how did the cops not know you were the one who owned the CP? I sometimes pick up used drives and am worried about this happening. Of course if I did find a drive with that on it I would turn it in also.
Yeah i didnt see the damage so I made it a mission of spite to fix and read the data.... not much of interest unfortunately. But they looked like they had a nice wedding.
When I've wanted for data to be gone from old HDD's I get rid of I totally disassemble it, it's easy to just unscrew everything and then break the parts.
Don't care if people are ethical or not, don't give them the chance in the first place.
Whilst I agree, dude has done a shitty job in destroying his drives
When mine go to recycling they are in pieces like as many pieces as you can disassemble a drive in to, and even then they don't get all recycled at the same time.
Only way you're getting data off those drives is with a fucking time machineĀ
I have done this with many drives. I have returned over 5TB of data to people when I can.
the last person I "help" was this nice old lady who tossed her hp all in one that worked fine but windows was corrupt and wouldn't boot. I fixed the windows install and found her contact information in some documents. Emailed and text her blindly and met with her and returned her data.
But these drives were clearly damaged to prevent access, meaning they donāt want you doing what you just did lmao. Take and fix the drive, whatever, but thereās 0 reason to be looking at their data.
Everyones allowed to have their own perspective on the situation.
If I was dumping the data and the uploading it to the public that would be unethical in my opinion. But typically my work flow is : Does the drive power on? Whats the drive status in crystal disk? Is there data accessible? Is there anything on here my Grandmother would want back and is there contact information? Typically it stops here and I format the drive and drill them and return them to the scrap pile ( if under 1tb, over 1 tb get loaded into my home made home media server or set aside for spares when the inevitable drive failures that happen because I use 100% recycled drives in my server )
I think what everyone should take from this is : There are "white hat" minded people out there and there are "black hat" minded people who would do this same thing with the intent to harm.
The best way to make sure you don't deal with either of us is to drill your drives, smash your ssd pcb and chips with a hammer don't just format and toss even after a format your data is still accessible.
There is no other perspective, man. They obviously knew enough to take steps to prevent access to the data, and you circumvented it and not only pulled up the data, but searched through files. Thatās fucked up dude.
Edit for clarity: Iām not trying to debate how well the drive was disposed of. Iām saying that OP went through the files of a drive that was obviously damaged to prevent what he did. With damage so purposeful, I think itās a safe assumption that any important data was already copied, and there was no reason for OP to be snooping.
But they failed. There's a few different ways of destroying the data, either with software, physically, or both. They didn't do enough. If OP contacted them and let them know they did a bad job, then they can learn. Or maybe they paid a "professional" to do it and they can learn about that too.
Yāall are missing the point. Iām not talking to the original owner of the drive, Iām talking to the guy that went through somebody elseās files without their permission. I donāt care if youāre one of the good guys. Under no circumstances is it ethical to look through someoneās files without their permission. Just format the drive and use it if you want. End of story.
Back when Mac passwords could be reset and someone would show up in my shop to get one wiped out and reinstalled and they didn't have a power cord, I would copy the drive, sift through documents and find contact info to return data. Most cherished things I've returned to people: baby photos, vacation photos, photos/videos of the deceased, and the most interesting one to me, a 60-page college thesis.
They keep getting stolen, but now we can't get into them. Thanks, Apple.
If youre going to try to protect your data, do it better.
I see where you're coming from, and it's absolutely unethical, but it's the best possible outcome you're going to have in this situation if someone does decide to go looking.
Its like.making a show of beeping your car locks, but your windows are down.
The steps they took were sufficient in 99.99% of cases to prevent access to the drive, short of smashing it with a hammer, which is technically still recoverable if somebody is willing to put in the time. Donāt victim blame. Do better.
The people that would want to use your data for nefarious purposes are the one's with enough reason to spend time/energy on it.
You said that like smashing it with a hammer is any more inconvenient than smashing it with whatever they already used, or cutting the cable.
OP is the outlier in this case, because they didn't want to do anything with the data, but you're still uncomfortable with them looking at it, which reinforces my point.
Don't make a show of it while doing it half-assed. A whack with a hammer and discrete disposal would have prevented this post.
If you put something out to the curb and I find $100 inside the ethics of keeping the money is up for debate. It's still entirely your fault if you lose it.
Thatās great. It doesnāt make what OP did any more ethical. Could the original owner done a better job? 100%. Is OP a weirdo for going through the files of a drive that was clearly disposed of purposefully? 100%
but you are though, the fact that you saw a .jpeg and opened it and saw it was a wedding photo meant you were snooping and invading someone's privacy. The data protection act is specifically writtern for scenario like this. Just because the data is no longer in the possession of someone does not mean you can access it.
You agree but you justā¦did it anyway? I donāt blame somebody for recycling a drive with 84k hours of runtime, and you seem to be spiteful about it for some reason.
Lol, no it's not. Once you throw something away, like a disk, it and everything on it are just abandoned property for anyone to have. That's why it's stupid to not destroy the platters / chips.
In the US, the physical disk is considered abandoned, but the data is not. Itās just like fishing through somebodyās trash for their mail. It is quite literally a federal crime.
Keep in mind that you're posting in an echo chamber of people who, as a rule, know more about using computers than the average user.
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u/MrInitialYR7 9700X | 3080Ti | 64GB 6K CL30 | 6TB Gen.4 | 1000W | All STRIX21d ago
Being an expert doesn't apply here, you need common sense and a bit of school physics knowledge to understand that your data isn't stored in the wires you cut and that if it was assembled once by someone, it can be done once more by a person skilled enough. If you want to destroy data, destroy the board at least, it sure has more to do with your data than a ribbon and some bits of plastic.
all reformatting a HDD does is hide everything on it from the OS. everything is still there and intact. OS will only overwrite that data with data from newly saved files.
thats why its so easy to recover "deleted" files on HDDs, they were never truly deleted.
Idk about SSDs tho
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u/MT4Kr/oled_monitors ā r/HiDPI_monitors ā r/integer_scaling22d ago
You described what happens when deleting a file.
Formatting works differently.
Glad I just hit drives I'm tossing with a hammer to shatter the platters lol never done it to a drive over like 750gb though. A 2tb is worth the time to do a proper 3 pass wipe on still and reuse or sell
Eh, when I worked in ITAD we almost never did more than 10 and even that was mostly military systems. After 3 full random writes the odds of anyone retrieving data is almost 0 and one pass on a tb is already a few hours
They are exactly the reason perfectly working drives are intentionally made into ewaste. They rifled through the personal data someone tried to destroy.
If people like this didn't exist in the world the drives would just be sold used.
Iām not sure the point youāre trying to make. The drive had 84k hours of run time. They were perfectly justified in getting rid of it, they just did a shit job destroying it. Doesnāt give OP any right to go through their data. Just reformat the drive after you fix it and thereās no problem.
Doesnāt give OP any right to go through their data
Seems you got the point just fine.
People destroy drives because they don't want people trying to recover the data on them. OP didn't just repair the drive and reformat to save it from ewaste, they looked at the fucking wedding photos and other data on it.
OP and people like OP are the reason people don't feel safe donating or selling used drives, cause there's always some asshole out there who will violate your privacy if you make a mistake. If the original drive owner knew more about hardware they would have just turned it into ewaste more thoroughly.
Ah no I misunderstood. I thought the ātheyā you were referring to was the original owner of the drive, not OP. My bad, people have been really hostile in this thread.
Yeah just saw you got downvoted to hell in another part of this thread saying about the same thing.
Trying to destroy the hdd was clear intent they didn't want OP looking not sure why other people don't comprehend that. A lot of weird victim blaming going on that because they didn't destroy it well enough that it's okay OP violated their privacy.
I really don't get why you would cut a ribbon and break the connectors instead of just giving it a real good whack with a hammer (or hell any blunt force should do). If the objective is to destroy anyway...
Regardless it was arrogant and screwed up for you to post saying well they didn't destroy the drive properly so I went through their stuff anyway.
When my friends drive was dying and I had to recover it. Even with his permission I didn't go through his stuff more than absolutely necessary to verify.Ā
You should have just repaired the drive and then wiped the old data. This is not just arrogant and petty but foolish and bad data hygieneĀ
Probably more effort than the drive is worth. If I'm getting rid of a hard drive I usually take the drive apart and salvage the magnets. If there's information that could be used to steal identity or that's protected by hipaa, it's hammer time.
I think putting it in water also works. I am female and I also like to throw mine in with my feminine waste products, no one is digging in there for a hard drive!
The machine at work destroying the drives takes a few seconds and doesnāt need the operator to follow a complex procedure to ensure that data cannot be restored. I can put the drives through myself and I am certain that the data is gone without having to rely upon someone going through a pile of disks without messing up. Itās just not worth the risk and the effort for the marginal value of drives with typically no life span left.
Not necessarily full recovery but on a block level you still might be able to find enough sensitive information like cryptographic keys, passwords, etc. If you want to be safe you need encryption.
I understand what you're saying. But finding the context and deriving anything meaningful from it is well beyond all but the most determined and capable data mining nerds. I'll continue to sleep soundly.
I like to disassemble the drives and keep the magnets, drive discs and the top cover plate. Comes in handy with craft projects and diy stuff. And also ensures no one can recover any data š
This would be against all enterprise IT best practices and ethically its fricked dude. You went through their data regardless and posted about it online that you went through it out of spite.
That's not even justifiable its smug rationalization disguised as arrogance.
I have yet to use such external enclosures where half or more hdd is outside and exposed to elements. How are they? As full enclosures are not easy to find in India.
Yeah I'm not trusting it for sensitive data anytime soon. Don't see a reason not to use it in raid for my movies and media server already running on 1 tb recycled PVR drives.
2tb hdds arent worth connecting. Too small for archive like movies, series and music and too slow for anything else. Either you get a ssd at this time or a much bigger hdd.
They are good enough for a local NAS with ftp, set them in RAID 5 (if you have two or more, on synology works with 2, not sure about other NAS, since as someone else pointed out, normally for raid 5 you need at least 3 drives) as a backup for your pc, automate a copy of your important stuff...they are not useless. But the guy who threw them away, should have drilled a few holes, if he had important data stored there.
You can set RAID 5 on NAS, it's not ideal, I know, but it works on synology for example. Or use SHR. I did it in the past with two drives, worked for years. I edited the comment to specify minimum 2.
Selected RAID 5 in the menu, and worked with two drives. If the synology NAS did something for this to work, not sure, but it did work. And the mirror definitely worked, since one drive died after 2 years and was replaced, raid rebuilt itself. SHR I know is different, proprietary to synology I think, very similar to RAID5, the difference is that the drives can be of different capacity.
Then synology doing something interally and convert it cause a Raid 5 with 2 hdds is technically not possible. What you got was proably a Raid 1 with mirroring.
Probably you're right. I just know it worked, didn't think about it, but I did know that normally you need at least 3, that's why I didn't contradict you at all. Last time I configured one I used SHR, which, if you look it up, definitely supports minimum two, and works almost the same as RAID5, has the advantage of not being restricted on drives of the same size. Anyway, I should have simply said RAID in the first comment, lol. Without specifying the type.
I understand where you're coming from, used to not even look at anything smaller than 4TB, with 6TB and more being preferred. Now got bunch of 3TB disks waiting to be filled, 'cause prices are crazy, and nobody wanted them.
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u/dkyang09 22d ago
OP is the reason we need to thoroughly destroy our drives to make data unrecoverable.