Over time, we have accumulated a number of hard disks that are faulty. Fortunately, most of these come from servers with RAID 1,
so there wasn't data lost, or server downtime. However, there is customer data on the disks, so we hang on to the disks,
rather than discard or return for warranty exchange, until we figure out how to destroy the data on the disks.
Recently, we looked at how to destroy these hard disks. There's degaussing, shredding the entire harddisk, purpose made machines to drill
holes through the platters etc. Lots of videos on youtube of demos of products for destroying hard disks. The harddisk shredder was particularly
entertaining.
We have only thereabouts 30 disks that needs to be destroyed, so getting equipment that costs SGD 15000 and up is a bit hard to justify. It was
tempting though. In any case, we went the "labour intensive" route of taking apart the disks by unscrewing the hard disk casing,
and putting the PCB and platters through a shredder. Why destroy the PCB as well? Because there's a cache chip on it which contains data.
Here's some photos of a disk being dissected,
 
Xssist
Mar 09
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