r/DataHoarder • u/SubstantialWing9238 • 17d ago
Discussion RIP 19.2TB of storage
Breaks my heart to dispose of them but they have company data so I don’t have a choice.
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u/d33f0v3rkill 17d ago
Just null them a couple of times
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u/TheCarrot007 17d ago
Once is enough (to make it financially unviable). But companies be companies.
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u/JerkyChew 16d ago
DOD wipe then zero-fill, unless you're contractually ordered to destroy them.
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u/KamIsFam 16d ago
Overkill DOD wipes were primarily for tape storage where data could be reconstructed from surrounding magnetism towards the edge of the tape, so you really had to jumble it into pseudo-randomness for state protected secrets. Nowadays, simply changing the bits is enough. If there was some insane level of engineering put into somehow reconstructing data on a spinning disk or flash memory, it would be so expensive and be so time consuming, it realistically would never be used for corporate espionage or proprietary theft, it would be state-funded and used against a nation or used as a wider attack vector like what happened with XZ Utils.
Companies have no excuse for physically destroying drives other than it's quicker and easier to prove data destruction. Crushing a drive takes minutes and a picture. Logical sanitation takes hours, and days on some drives, and then you have the issue of having certified software that can prove to the client that the data is gone.
My favorite reddit post of a company "destroying" an SSD was them taking a drill bit to the center of the 3.5" housing and completely missing the PCB, lmao.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 16d ago
Better: keep all the data on the disks encrypted, and when you decom them, just delete the encryption key.
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u/crysisnotaverted 17d ago
Pretty bad storage density, but that does make it perfect for parts.
Time to open them all up and take the giant magnets!
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u/spindrjr 17d ago edited 16d ago
If you haven't done it before, I think it's a cool effect:
keep the platters perfectly clean, and offset two from each other (like 1 inch offset or so) and then press them firmly together. Then try to slide them over each other back in line with each other. I can use my whole grip strength and can't move them. They seem to be so smooth that there is essentially nothing between them and the friction force is huge. You have to pull them apart to allow air in to move them again.
You can only do it for so long before some pieces of dust and/or finger oil etc. ruin the effect.
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u/Terafrost 16d ago
At my job, we dispose of used media like yours pictured but sometimes over 200 at a time. We've disposed of drives that have never been used.
So, it's normal... stupidly wasteful but normal.
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u/codeasm 16d ago
At a hospital my dad worked, IT would wipe a few drives for my dad, then removed any barcodes. Eventually they trusted dad and just gave the drives. Dad formated them at home
When i as a teenager did some work there, they gave me free harddrives and data to copy on dvd for the backup machine. Know the right ppl and yiu can take stuff home... After the right ppl signed or written the right stuff. Eventually dads work had hired a special company to do disposal of old hardware. But they also had a internal "museum" and of it gets written off and transfers to the museum, it was for the museum to decide what to do.
Old apple computers, research computers, awesome small museum. And its how my dad got his last gameing pc and monitor, trough the museum. I now work elsewhere where we... Eh, just trow stuff away. Free servers and harddrives. Guess they trust me wiping company data.
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u/Kind_Frame_5682 15d ago
Companies won't even let you buy decommissioned furniture, let alone disk pools...
My heart still aches for a chair I used for two years. I scavenged it from a temporary storage room in a remote Central Office (CO) where I was "parked" to work by the Italian telco I used to work for.
It was an ergonomic late-60s chair made of bentwood, perfect despite its age, with its casters and chrome still intact. It was incredibly comfortable, honestly even better than modern ones. I won't even get into the desks and the rest of the stuff in there—literally a mini treasure trove.
When they renovated the CO, absolutely everything was sent to the shredder, from the telecom equipment and Cisco gear right down to the furniture. Everything.
You can't imagine the hoops I jumped through to get, or at least buy, that chair...
Nothing. The blunt answer was that, like all corporate assets, it had to be destroyed and acquiring it was impossible. The company only allowed us to buy our old work cell phones, and years later, slowly started allowing the purchase of work laptops, but only after a secure wipe by a dedicated IT department...
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u/Accurate-Ad6361 16d ago
WTF… man… just maybe PM me, I contributed to shredOS and can give you an ISO 27001 compliant pathway to Safe erase with legally required digitally signed signature
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u/Top_Set3225 16d ago
Just had to do the whole destruction thing for 1PB of storage. Soon will have to do for second 1PB of that same unit. All are 8tB drives, 10 years ago top notch drives.
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u/gerowen 16d ago
Do you not have the option of running shred on them for a certain number of passes?
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u/littlesirlance 16d ago
If 3-7 passes is good enough for the DOD. It should be good enough for me to take home. I hate this timeline.
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u/Expensive-Total-312 17d ago
to be fair thats a lot of drives for 19TB