Companies that destroy hard drives to protect data, sad

[djheater]

Originally posted by: lozina

Originally posted by: LeiZaK
I had a contract with walmart once to drill holes in server HDD's... went to 135 stores in 5 different states. ended up drilling holes in ~600-700 20-40 GB SCSI hard drives.

20-40 gb scsis? Dude you shoulda ebayed those suckers and made a ton of cash.

No one in their right minds fvcks with a Walmart contract.

 

[yuppiejr]

Those old machines are junk - you're being paid to destroy them for a reason. Just finish the job and move on... The machines have undoubtedly been written off of the company books and he's probably paying you separately to junk them so there's a nice tidy trail to disposal of the assets.

In addition to technical obsolescence, the issue of increasing failure rate on older hardware makes it impractical to try and redeploy these to end-users. Any agency that is trying to provide these to "poor people" is going to have a nightmare of a support mess on their hands. They are better off investing the refurbish and support costs into new PC's, it will probably cost less in the end and provide something much more usable to the recipient. The only people to whom hardware like this has any value are those who can maintain and support it past end of life (geeks like us).

 

[MisterJackson]

I find a sledge hammer to be a lot more efficent than a drill 😉

 

[jhayx7]

We destroy our hard drives but we have to do it because of government regulations. All of our hard drives are picked up via a company and they shred them.

We do donate some of our equipment and they have to be run through a "DoD" approved zero fill application, seven times.

 

[OutHouse]

yesterday we destoyed about 200 hard drives from a a couple of old Data General arrays. it was lots of fun. 🙂

i did feel sad though. those arrays were bought in 1998 and were easily 80K each. nothing but junk now. but we had to get rid of them, they havent been used in a couple of years and the junk clutter was getting out of hand.

 

[MrBond]

It's not that far fetched to think a competitor would go to great lengths to get the data off an old HDD like that. Here's a hypothetical situation based on something I just read on Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/26/hp-a...ing-on-dell-like-the-movies-only-lame/

Say Dell was getting rid of a bunch of computers from their printer research group. They wipe them and send them off to a recycling place that uses them in PC's for low-income families. They're unloaded by Bob, whose brother Jim works at HP's printer R&D group. Bob knows the drives came from Dell, so he takes a few and gives them to Jim. Jim then recovers the data and they've got a bunch of Dell printer R&D to help give them the edge.

Remember, hypothetical situation, but I could see something like that happening in a competitive industry.

 

[0roo0roo]

probably the smart thing to do. cheap pcs are so cheap these days that i do'nt think theres a huge demand for drives that small even for the "needy".

and i remember watching on the bbc about where some scrapped hd's end up, in places like africa where they can get exploited ...stealing identities or whatever based on info off drives. in the show they went to africa bought some old drives and tracked down the owners based on what info was left on their drives and showed up at their door😛 sure u were going to format them, but i doubt its worth the time/wages they pay you.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: mchammer
Technically you have only erased the part where the drill went through, people with $$$ equiptment could still read it. I don't how important the stuff you are dealing with is though.

I like to take my old hard drives out to the desert and shoot them multiple times. I used to have a platter with a .45 hole in it. A .45 slug will go right through a hard drive like a hot knife through butter.

 

[Vic]

I don't see the issue here. I work for a bank and these kind of privacy measures are required by federal law. Hell, this is only the tip of the iceberg. For example, I'm not allowed to leave my laptop in my car, even locked.

 

[FreshPrince]

destroying hard drives is not uncommon anymore...it's cheaper to destroy depreciated equipment than to waste time doing the dod-wipe.

just take them to the shooting range and have a ball 😀

 

[AndrewR]

For high security classification hard drives in the military, there is NO alternative to having the drives destroyed. You cannot reformat, degauss or anything else except reuse the drives on a similarly classified system. I salvaged several 80GB drives that were about to be destroyed (along with 8 GB of RAM) from some systems that were being replaced, and I couldn't stomach the thought of having 400GB of storage just trashed for no reason. So far we've reused one, which saved the government some money at least!

Computer destruction is immense in the government.

 

[Stiganator]

Yeah I think its better to just do a 35 pass DBAN.