Verity manual hard drive destroyer (Gallery: How to destroy your hard drive)

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Depends on who wants to read it ...

Just destroying the mechanism renders the drive from being read in its original form. But the data can still linger on any undamaged platter surface. Your average ID thief or corporate spy doesn't have the tools to deal with this, but governments and large corporations do. Using well-equipped labs with tools like atomic force microscopes, they can recover data directly from the platter. When I worked for a government contractor, they had three approved methods for disposing of hard drives with "secured" data: abrasion, acid, and heating. In all of them, the drive was disassembled, and the platters were either sandblasted, dipped in acid baths, or heated with blowtorches. One of my fellow workers spent two months taking apart old 20GB drives, and laboriously toasting each side of a platter with a butane torch, all under the watchful eyes of armed security guards.

Posted by: terry flores   Posted on: 07/22/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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