Hard Drive Destruction

I visited my parents over the labor day weekend and had some old hard drives to attend to. One of them happened to belong to a relative who is a nurse, and was worried about patient data on the hard drive. So, I had to make sure that the drive could never destroy data again. And why destroy one hard drive when you can destroy four?

Before I show these pics, I'd like to mention that I was playing with power tools. This necessitated me wearing the proper eye protection and, now that I think about it, I really should have worn work boots as well. You probably shouldn't try this at home. I shouldn't have tried it at home, either. :-P

The victims:




First technique:




That didn't work so well, so I decided to make use of gravity instead:




The leopard did it, in the basement, with the power drill:



That drive on the left was a real pain to drill through. It had a good 2mm or so aluminum plate in the back of it which took some serious effort to drill through. I had to stop several times due to the amount of smoke and the fact that the drill bit began to glow red hot.

At this point, I am quite certain that no one will be able to read that patient data. :-)

The full archive, which contains even more pictures, is over here.

11 pounds of thermite vs 10 blocks of ice

sethb's comment about how I should have used thermite on those old hard drives got me searching on YouTube for videos of thermite. Most of them were pretty much what I would expect -- various things being melted/destroyed by thermite.

Then I found the below video. It's 11 pounds of thermite being lit off on top of 10 large blocks of ice. The results are somewhat surprising!

Watch on YouTube