On 18/12/15 11:37 PM, Anthony de Boer wrote:
I'm told the Pentagon leans toward taking its busted hard drives to a nearby army base and melting them down with thermite. I've found that a .25" drill bit tends to go dull really fast drilling through old hard drives, but a pneumatic chisel with a pointy bit turns them into unreadable scrap pretty quickly. The project being worth $10k to someone does rather say that someone found that a better bargain than going to jail.
They're a former customer of mine: when a disk goes in US data centres, they cut off the identifying label with a power-saw and return it for credit, then grind the disks themselves to dust. Certain field-use equipment is destroyed by shoving thermite or a WP grenade in the back of the case and running like hell. If I were tasked with cleaning up after something that required disk destruction, I'd order a bunch of new preinstalled-windows disks first, swap them out and then disassemble and grind off the magnetic surfaces with a disk-grinder before discarding the old disks. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain