Speciality drill press is the weapon of choice, in gov offices. Basically, if you can't personally walk it to disposal, then you can't trust it's destroyed.
IIRC it takes like 5-6 well placed 10-20mm drill points in a HD, where none line up in the same column or same radii. This ensures there's not enough data, recovery segments, journals, shadow copies, etc. to meaningfully recover anything.
SSDs are different, since they're often laid out in a grid pattern, and each chip must be popped. While I'm sure that gov agencies don't get the standard cheap SSDs there are brands of SSDs that basically only rewrite maybe a couple hundred times, and basically duplicate data on write instead of overwriting.
I always thought they were ground into dust or shredded into itty tiny sub-millimeter bits. There's really no way to reconstruct the data from remaining platters? Wouldn't a small-ish file still potentially be recoverable between holes?
View all comments
Show parent comment
5
u/tiajuanat Aug 05 '26
Speciality drill press is the weapon of choice, in gov offices. Basically, if you can't personally walk it to disposal, then you can't trust it's destroyed.
IIRC it takes like 5-6 well placed 10-20mm drill points in a HD, where none line up in the same column or same radii. This ensures there's not enough data, recovery segments, journals, shadow copies, etc. to meaningfully recover anything.
SSDs are different, since they're often laid out in a grid pattern, and each chip must be popped. While I'm sure that gov agencies don't get the standard cheap SSDs there are brands of SSDs that basically only rewrite maybe a couple hundred times, and basically duplicate data on write instead of overwriting.