Destroy Old Hard Drives with a Drill?

[all41]

What's to tell?
much

[Lady Fitzgerald]

What's to tell?
much

Who put the troll burr under your saddle?

[all41]

What's to tell?
much

Who put the troll burr under your saddle?

how did we stagger from the drill bit topic
?

[GS3]

https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... s.html#ID4

Never use cleaning applications like BleachBit (nor defrag apps)
4. With cleaning applications like BleachBit or deborphan, you easily destroy more than you want. They're software wrecking balls that can damage your system beyond repair.

You can't trust them, because unless you're very careful, they remove too much and damage the system. Sometimes so heavily, that your Mint can't boot into the desktop anymore. Under certain circumstances, BleachBit can even pollute your system with massive amounts of junk.

BleachBit, deborphan and others like them are superfluous at best, and disastrous at their worst. They're "tools" that primarily cater to the psychological needs of new Linux users who come fresh from Windows, and mistakenly assume that certain essential Windows maintenance is needed on Linux as well.

I have never used Bleachbit and, in fact, had never heard of it until now. I see it is not the type of tool I want where I would select a file or a group of files and the tool would overwrite the sectors several times. As has been said, it is more like CCleaner where it "cleans up" in an undefined and dangerous way. Yeah, I don't think I need or want that although I suppose it would work for someone who wanted to wipe entire drives. It would work for someone who wants to dispose of drives and wants to make sure they are truly wiped clean.

In Windows, for individual files, I like the PGP-wipe command. Use that on a file and it is gone forever, overwritten a dozen times. I would welcome something simple like that for Linux. Right click on file, choose "wipe" and be done.

In any case, any sensitive files I have are encrypted so anyone getting my HDD is not getting my files anyway. If you want to protect the confidentiality of your files you need to encrypt them.

For entire HDD I consider generally a format and install new OS is enough for me. If someone came to me telling me they needed to *really* make sure not even three letter agencies could get in there then I would use PGP-wipe on the entire disk and if I didn't have PGP available then I would just fill the HDD with big files several times. Whatever they say, I believe once you have written over a sector two or three times the initial info is gone forever.

People overestimate the value of the information contained in their computers and the amount of effort some random schmuck is going to put into getting it. Take a HDD and reformat it in a different system (NTFS, ext4, etc), copy a few files and I guarantee no one is going to spend any time trying to get the information you had earlier. And if they did they would fail.

For anyone who really wants to make sure their files remain safe I would recommend Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) where the encryption is transparent to the OS and there is no need to even wipe the drive at the end of its life. Change the encryption key and all data is lost forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware-based_full_disk_encryption#Disk_sanitisation

[AndyMH]

Self-Encrypting Drives

Nice idea, very expensive - had a look. Rough metric 5x the cost of the same un-encrypted capacity. I'll stick with veracrypt

[GS3]

Self-Encrypting Drives

Nice idea, very expensive - had a look. Rough metric 5x the cost of the same un-encrypted capacity. I'll stick with veracrypt

I have several. Some came with surplus government laptops (ancient, Dell Latitude D620) and I did not pay any extra. The laptops came with SED, TPM and smartcard reader.

I have also bought three or four SED from ebay, used, for low price. I have never bought brand new but I would think by now they could be pretty much the same as regular drives or a little more.

I have a couple SED on a shelf waiting for me to put them to use. Even though they are tiny SATA 2.5" I was thinking of installing one each on my desktop Linux boxes but they sit on the shelf waiting for me to install them but I cannot be bothered.

I think it is very probable that many new drives are, in fact, SED but the users are not aware because if you do not enable the feature it behaves like a regular drive.

https://www.crucial.com/articles/about- ... a-security

The Crucial® MX-series SSDs have a 256-bit AES encryption controller. It's simple to swap out a hard drive or existing solid state drive for an SSD with better data security.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0786QNS9B/
Crucial MX500 500GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD, up to 560MB/s - CT500MX500SSD1 - AES 256 bit hardware based encryption
$55.99 USD

https://www.trentonsystems.com/blog/sel ... ing-drives

SEDs can be slightly more difficult to find than conventional, non-encrypting drives because marketing for self-encrypting drive features is not as robust. But if you interpret it to mean that SEDs in general are “scarce” or “not widely available,” well, that's not entirely the case.

This seemingly conventional Samsung SSD 860 EVO 250GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E250B/AM) is a perfect case in point. It’s readily available for purchase on Amazon for just $50, but you’ll have to read the fine print to see that the drive “supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption and is compliant with TCG Opal.”

IMHO, at this stage of the game, all new drives should be SED just like WIFI and https are encrypted. It should be the norm.

Most probably the SED HDD that I have on the shelf will never be mounted because I would get a SSD SED instead.

[old_noob]

now there is an idea, the Union Pacific RR tracks are adjacent to my property for about 600 feet.
simple thing to do, just walk out to the berm and lay it on the track...

Especially since ammo is expensive these days...

[Portreve]

Your best bet is to strap C4 to them, then drop them into a tank assembly with a thousand gallons each of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

Oh, and be sure to remote donate it.

[DAMIEN1307]

Oh, and be sure to remote donate it.

Did you want to "donate" that mess or just "detonate" it all...lol...DAMIEN

[Portreve]

Oh, and be sure to remote donate it.

Did you want to "donate" that mess or just "detonate" it all...lol...DAMIEN

I suppose that depends on your definition of "donate".

Gotta love smartphone keyboards sometimes.

[151tom]

I take old hard drives out to the farm lean them against a piece of plywood leaning against a fence post and blast them full of bullet holes with my 357 magnum revolver.

Besides completely destroying the hard drive I find it's very enjoyable and relaxing.

[AndyMH]

I don't understand, what is it with you Americans and the delight in things that go bang

[DAMIEN1307]

I don't understand, what is it with you Americans and the delight in things that go bang

The real bangs we love are the sonic booms we get to hear almost daily right here in Alamogordo NM, since it has an AFB choke full of F-16 fighters on training manoeuvres...We also get to see missles being fired from the White Sands Missile Range base here as well...And lest we forget the really big bang the folks here got to hear in 1945 when the first Atomic boom boom was detonated...It was called "Trinity"...lol...DAMIEN

Ps...We call these "bangs" or "booms" "The sounds of freedom" over here...lol.

[AZgl1800]

I don't understand, what is it with you Americans and the delight in things that go bang

So,
just what do you do, when an intruder breaks into your home and threatens your wife and kids?

me, I have a shotgun with Double-Ought buckshot, a 9mm auto loader, and a .45 caliber 1911 look-alike.

if you survive that, what I have is yours.

and yes, I love hearing Sonic Booms....

[GELvdH]

A $3 ceramic magnet from Lowes passed over the disk a few times does a nice job and it lets a new owner reinitialize it to an as new disk.

[Portreve]

I don't understand, what is it with you Americans and the delight in things that go bang

It's an inferiority complex, and so we're always searching for some kind of, um... compensation.

[cliffcoggin]

So,
just what do you do, when an intruder breaks into your home and threatens your wife and kids?

me, I have a shotgun with Double-Ought buckshot, a 9mm auto loader, and a .45 caliber 1911 look-alike.

Any possible reply I could make to this would be overtly political so you will have to imagine it. I shan't comment further.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I don't understand, what is it with you Americans and the delight in things that go bang

So,
just what do you do, when an intruder breaks into your home and threatens your wife and kids?

me, I have a shotgun with Double-Ought buckshot, a 9mm auto loader, and a .45 caliber 1911 look-alike.

if you survive that, what I have is yours.

and yes, I love hearing Sonic Booms....

I don't need a gun to protect myself from home intruders. Most likely, one would see me naked without my makeup on and the sight of that would instant blind the intruder and the shock would destroy the intruder's mind.

All seriousness aside, I feel the choice to have guns is a personal choice and I choose to try to avoid needing one (it's been working for the past 70+ years). I have nothing against people owning guns for sport or defense but I also feel people don't need more fire power than Marines or Navy Seals for recreation or personal protection (BTW, I don't consider your "arsenal" to be excessive). I also know that if I display a gun, I will need to use it immediately to avoid having whoever I'm pointing the gun at shooting first or having the intruder turn the gun against me. And even though I would be justified in killing an intruder in self-defense, I would not want to have that on my conscience the rest of my life.

In other news (there I go again), I can't remember the last time I heard a sonic boom. There are some benefits to living in a megalopolis.

[GS3]

So, just what do you do, when an intruder breaks into your home and threatens your wife and kids?

me, I have a shotgun with Double-Ought buckshot, a 9mm auto loader, and a .45 caliber 1911 look-alike.

I have no idea. What do they do in civilised countries?

[AndyMH]

I have no idea. What do they do in civilised countries?

Call the police, which in our case are also unarmed. But I do feel we are teetering into dangerous territory, so probably best to go back to destroying drives.