Join or sign in Register for your free TechRepublic membership or if you are already a member, sign in using your preferred method below. Use Your Email Use FacebookUse Linkedin

What to do with old hard drives/tapes

Locked

Hi,

I was wondering what other network administrators due with their retired hard drives and tape backups in order to insure no data can be read off them when they are ready to be discarded?

Thanks.

Topic

Killdisk

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

I use a little utility called Killdisk. There’s a free version that allows you one pass, and a pay version that allows up to 99 passes. It’s run from a bootable floppy. It writes all bits to 0 or 1. Nothing leaves my shop without at least 2 passes. Three passes is supposed to be DOD compliant.

If I’m feeling extra paranoid, I bring them to our machine shop to bend them or drill through them.

I’ve heard the NRA uses theirs on the target range.

DBAN

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

Darik’s Boot And Nuke, a free download, can do a variety of overwrites including the Dept of Defense method and a lot more. In my tests, 1 pass of pseudorandom data is sufficent to destroy the data to the point that any commonly available forensics program cannot retrieve it. Just search on DBAN.

If you are paranoid or don’t need the disks or tapes anymore, physically destroy them with a sledge hammer. This is also a good method when the drive has crashed and I can’t do a software overwrite.

Don’t

In reply to DBAN

do the sledgehammer for some laptop drives, they have glass platters and will shatter in 1000 pieces all over your floor, walls and you

Lots

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

I’d start with a good tool to format then run the disk over an electromagenet. That should do ya!

Electro magnet

In reply to Lots

I use a large degaussing coil left over from the old color CRTs Its big enough to pass even an
old 8 inch drive right thru the center.

I destroy them, I’m paranoid.

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

sometimes I take them apart and let my kids decorate the disk and make stuff.
The magnets inside are good for magnetizing screwdriver tips if you do much work on portables.

blast ’em

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

I had a bunch of old scsi drives from our old as400- i did not want to take the time to run the fbi’s eraser program (takes about 8 hours per pass and requires 3 passes) so i took them and all of our old bad drives and went traget practicing- i can guarantee no one will can data off these drives which was my only criteria. (and hey it was fun)

Destruction of Hard Drives

In reply to What to do with old hard drives/tapes

If you have EXTREMELY sensitive data and want the HD destroyed try get the actual disk out of it’s case and melt it with a plasma cutter. 😀

[Author]

Replies