Securely & Completely Erase a Hard Drive

[DigEagle]

Hey everyone, I found this really interesting article on Technology Review today about a new device that researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute developed to completely erase the contents of a hard drive and render it useless. It is essentially a giant magnet. There are many applications for this product, whether for erasing sensitive government information or just credit card and personal information from a home PC. You can check out the article here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17007&ch=infotech

 

[Brookfield]

Please look at this, mod's, I think his link should be deleted, this device could be used for illegal purposes, your opinions please.

 

[dude_se]

how would anyone get hold of one of them things lol. even if they did i dont see the problem. its their choice to use it and the thread starter hasnt suggested that anyone should use it for illegal purposes. the link just seems like a perfectly normal review.

 

[DannyBoy1]

but wouldn't the easiest thing to do be to smash it up..

 

[Cx]

ThePower:

Have you tried to smash a hard drive? At a lan party (Million Man Lan), Western Digital had a contest, whoever could take a WD hard drive, and smash, throw, toss, step on it to where it had data loss they'd recieve a free Raptor. Nobody won. Smashing the connectors or the hardware on it didn't count, as it just made it unusable, the data was still on the drive... So no it wouldn't.

Anybody with a strong enough magnent can cause harm to devices that store data magnetically, tapes, swipe cards, hard drives, pixels on a monitor.

I think the most reasonable way to format, is to write all zeros to your drive.

 

[MarxSoccer]

Please look at this, mod's, I think his link should be deleted, this device could be used for illegal purposes, your opinions please.

Pretty much every program link EVER posted could be used for illegal purposes, but does he have the intent to? I think not

 

[dude_se]

im sure there are other ways to destroy a hdd beside this

 

[baba_kadar89]

yeah i saw in the movie, as the police is about to bust this skini geek hacker he does this heart thing on the computers like when your about to die and your not breathing they shock your chest... he does that on his computers? what is that all about?

 

[user12]

put it on a drill press and call it a day.

no need for fancy stuff.

 

[Brookfield]

OK, I think that all that can be said has been said, I still think that thie info shouldn't have been posted in the first place, too late now, but..... thread closed.