Hard Drive RMA Question

[Supermercado]

A few weeks ago, I had a Western Digital drive go bad on me. I've got the replacement from WD and it's in and working, but I haven't sent the old drive back yet. I have some private data on the old drive and I'm just curious as to what WD's policies are concerning that data? Do they destroy the platters on dead drives, do they format them? If anyone has some information on it, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

 

[The Sauce]

You are responsible for making sure that your drives are sterile. Go to the WD site and look for a low-level format utility. I just RMA'ed a Maxtor drive and their utility was called MaxBlast. I ran that a few times...but it takes forever. Should probably work for the WD drive as well in a pinch.

 

[Supermercado]

Originally posted by: Snatchface
You are responsible for making sure that your drives are sterile. Go to the WD site and look for a low-level format utility. I just RMA'ed a Maxtor drive and their utility was called MaxBlast. I ran that a few times...but it takes forever. Should probably work for the WD drive as well in a pinch.

That's sort of what I figured. Any idea if any of these utilities will work on a drive that doesn't power up? That's the problem. It's not recognized in the BIOS at all.

 

[compudog]

No, they won't work on the drive. The best you can try to scramble the data before returning it is to subject the disk to intense magnetic field. A bulk tape eraser, or a special device designed just for that purpose. I realize you are not going to go out and buy one of these things. You can try the permanent magnet from a speaker, just lay the drive on the speaker magnet for a while, then flip it over. rotate it a few times etc. No way to know if the data is gone for sure, but it can't make it any easier to read...
Good Luck!

 

[Maelsturm]

A bigass magnet.

If you dont have a bigass magnet, you can make one. You need

1) a bigass piece of metal
2) a lot of wire
3) a big battery

car or flashlight would probably work

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Maelsturm
A bigass magnet.

If you dont have a bigass magnet, you can make one. You need

1) a bigass piece of metal
2) a lot of wire
3) a big battery

car or flashlight would probably work

Depending on how big of a battery we're talking, just know that shorting a battery can be a very bad thing, as in, possible explosion.
I've got 2 big speaker magnets - they can probably absolutley purge anything on a drive.

 

[Supermercado]

How big are we talking, here? Would something like my subwoofer do the trick? It's 6 1/2 inches, I think. And if that is big enough, would just setting the drive on top of the case be enough?

 

[Supermercado]

Bump.

 

[ai42]

If your anything like me you got a bunch of old 1-3gb out of warranty hard drives take out the hard drive magnets put it all over the drive and use an AT power supply to turn on the drive and spin the platters couple mintues of that should do the trick.

 

[tart666]

You need about 500 Oerstead of field to flip those domains on the HD media. So calculate the current based on that.

(edit) Check out here and here. These people recommend your magnet produce at least 1700 Oe to make sure the field is high enough. Apparently that is good enough for destruction of "top secret" DOD data.