Local inexpensive media destruction?

[John Abreau]

Last time I had to deal with this, I had about a dozen hard drives to
destroy. I dismantled them and degaussed the individual platters, then used
them as coasters, brought a few home to toss into the recycle bins at my
condo and at several friends' homes, etc.

I'm confident that this provided enough separation in space and time to
ensure it would not be feasible for nefarious types to reconstruct the data
that used to be on those platters, even if any of the bits managed to
survive degaussing. And while the procedure was probably far more than was
really necessary, the effort was fairly minor; as I recall, it took maybe
five minutes to dismantle each hard drive, and perhaps another minute or
two to degauss its platters.

Of course, this procedure wouldn't scale very well to the hundreds of hard
drives, floppies, etc. that you must have accumulated in 15+ years.


On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 7:04 PM, Matt Minuti <matt.minuti at gmail.com> wrote:

> The magnets inside hard drives are super strong - best fridge magnets
> you'll ever have. And the platters make decent first-surface mirrors.
> On Dec 22, 2014 5:08 PM, "Tom Buskey" <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
>
>> That seems pretty good.  If you have more time then $$, some things are
>> pretty easy.
>>
>> laptop drives shatter when dropped
>> regular drives can take a sledge.
>> You can disassemble the drive & sand/grind the magnetic coating.
>>
>> If you're less concerning than total destruction, there's the DBAN DVD to
>> write/overwrite.  I'd trust it enough with my personal quicken data, but
>> not someone else's (whoever my employer is).  Afterwards you could sell the
>> drives for upwards of $1 ea on ebay :-)
>>
>> Take the bits to the metal recycling at the dump.
>>
>> Some shredders can handle DVDs & CDs.
>>
>> Tapes are a bit harder.
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:06 PM, Kevin French <kfrench at gmilcs.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I suspect you've already considered the below but, for us, the price of
>>> $10 per drive was acceptable.   They did allow me to watch the destruction.
>>>
>>> NORTHEAST RECORD RETENTION, LLC
>>> 101 West River Road
>>> Hooksett, NH  03106
>>> www.nerecordretention.com
>>>
>>> -Kevin
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org [mailto:
>>> gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Dave Johnson
>>> Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 14:57
>>> To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>>> Subject: Local inexpensive media destruction?
>>>
>>>
>>> Anyone know of a local/inexpensive media destruction service?
>>>
>>>
>>> As I'm sure many of you do, I have a box with 15+ years of obsolete hard
>>> drives, floppy, tapes, CDR, DVDR, flash, etc... in my house.
>>>
>>> While there has been many trips to e-scrap over the years to get rid of
>>> computers, media is always removed before hand.
>>>
>>> There are plenty of companies that will provide me with destruction
>>> services including secure transport or on-site processing, liability
>>> insurance, certification, logs of all items, videos of my actual items
>>> being shredded, etc.. they all come with equally impressive bills.
>>>
>>> Simple degausing and/or physical destruction (preferably while I watch
>>> because that'd be cool) and the resulting scrap recycled is sufficient.
>>>
>>>
>>> If not, sounds like an opportunity for a data destruction party where
>>> someone has/rents a degauser and appropriate shredder.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Dave
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>>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
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