it's really hard to mutilate a hard drive.

[spanky]

so i have this smallish hard drive that i wanted to temporarily install windows 98 on. after a loooooooong time to fdisk.... and a looooooong time to format... at the very end, it tells me "invalid media". so in a pissed off state of mind, i pull the hard drive outta the machine... get 2 nimh AA batteries... and my digicam, and proceed outside. i tried to chuck the hard drive in the middle of an empty highway... in hopes it'll split open. no luck. so i pick it up, and wing it down the block. just another dent here... scratch there. so i spike it like a football. finally... the plastic part where the ide cables connects snaps off. i shake the hd around and hear something loose. success? not really. so a few more spikes.... success? nope... just a few more dents and scratches. finally, i gave in and accepted defeat. i have been owned by a dead wd hd. in the process, it cut my finger pretty good too. pix (6mb zip file)

 

[Kelvrick]

Noob!! You need a hammer and a pick axe. You can probably do it with just a screwdriver, but theres none of that violence to really make you feel good.

<== destructive monkey dance

 

[IGBT]

You need a solid brass 25lb deadblow sledge hammer...but don't screw up the sidewalk like last time...

 

[spanky]

but seriously... tossing it around was kinda fun

 

[yakko]

On old drives I just take them apart. They have some nice magnets in them.

 

[Danman]

My friend and I here at school were screwing around with some 500mb Maxtors and we decided to take off the top of it and watch it spin and throw sh!t in it. So we took the top off and plugged it in and took like screwdrivers and it made funny sounds and scratched the sh!t out of it. It was really fun.......until we got in trouble.

 

[Shagger]

They have some nice magnets in them.

The magnets are hella-sweet and super powerful! They are a lot of fun!

 

[Beau]

.22-250's do wonders to harddrives.

 

[Linflas]

Originally posted by: Shagger

They have some nice magnets in them.

The magnets are hella-sweet and super powerful! They are a lot of fun!

Those magnets are strong enough to cause some pain if you get pinched between them and some metal.

 

[PsychoAndy]

I just use a screwdriver and some elbow grease.

-PAB

 

[RossMAN]

Maybe I missed something but what were the two AA NiMH batteries for?

 

[spanky]

Originally posted by: RossMAN
Maybe I missed something but what were the two AA NiMH batteries for?

camara

 

[UltraQuiet]

You need a Dremel tool.

I can flat out fsck some sh!t up with my Dremel tool.

 

[iamwiz82]

Originally posted by: DaveSohmer
You need a Dremel tool.

I can flat out fsck some sh!t up with my Dremel tool.

haha! I have a 10GB Deskstar at home with the click of death. Maybe i should test my new digital dremel on it!

 

[bizmark]

yeah, they're pretty tough. It's really cool to take one apart (you have to have a tiny Torx screwdriver for all the ones I've ever deconstructed) and then you can plug it in and watch it spin. It's surprising the amount of wind they can generate. You can definitely feel it with your hand off to the side of the HD. I would expect that a perfectly smooth surface spinning in place wouldn't generate any air movement at all. I guess that air friction just picks up at 5000 RPM.

and yes, you can hurt yourself fairly seriously with those magnets. Cracked fingernails = bad.

Does anyone else find it kind of weird that there's an extremely powerful magnet inside every hard drive? I mean, we're told all the time that strong magnetic forces will destroy data on a hard drive.