Ruin a mechanical hard drive without physically damaging it

[neohelp]

Hello

What is the best way to ruin a mechanical hard drive without physically damaging it?

For example, SSD defragmating 1000 times over will problably ruin it yet you didn't get a hammer and smash it or anything.

[Hum]

What do you want to accomplish ?

 

You can simply zero it out -- all data will be gone.

[neohelp]

What do you want to accomplish ?

 

You can simply zero it out -- all data will be gone.

Make it unusable

[MarkusDarkus]

Flash it with a corrupt ROM

[Crisp]

Microwave?

But you'll ruin that to.

[Hum]

Make it unusable

I thought this section was about fixing things ... ? :laugh:

[Kernel]

Microwave?

But you'll ruin that to.

Really dangerous. Please don't suggest things like that.

[sc302 Veteran]

If you are trying to kill the drive, slamming it on the ground a few times works nicely...everyone has a floor, I wouldn't do this on tile or on wood though.  No need for tools.  It puts some nice deep scratches in the platters and crashes the heads, kills the motor and the bearings will go too.

 

I am sure you could think of some things to do to that controller board that would make the drive almost unusable, at least with that controller board...but there will be nothing that you could do to make the drive completely unusable/unretrievable without physical damage as the drive itself can be disected and data can be taken off.

[Draconian Guppy]

Magnets easily. Suprised no one has said it!

[Buttus]

borrow a jacobs ladder and fry it...  hahaha

 

or microwave it!   (ok, don't, it was already mentioned)

 

you want to make it so it doesn't work anymore, right?

 

what about boiling it in a pot of water?

[sc302 Veteran]

Magnets easily. Suprised no one has said it!

I can get a new controller and that would fix that issue.

[+BudMan MVC]

"Make it unusable "

Why would you want to do that? Are you trying to dispose of it and want to make sure your data is not readable? Then just wipe it with zeros to every sector.. Quick painless.. Your data is now gone..

If after you have done that, I don't see the point of physically make the drive unusable - sell it, give it to a buddy to use as spare, etc. Why would you want to prevent its use, if its still usable if your data has been securely removed?

[Hum]

^ I suspect this is about revenge -- and destroying someone else's computer.

[+BudMan MVC]

^ so yet another pointless thread that should just be ignored, or even modded then..

[Draconian Guppy]

I can get a new controller and that would fix that issue.

Yeah YOU would know what to do!  :shifty:

^ I suspect this is about revenge -- and destroying someone else's computer.

Pretty much :laugh:

[Charisma Veteran]

I am also curious as to why you want to know, lol. While it isn't directly against the rules per se, we'd rather not encourage and assist anyone with malicious behaviour.

 

That being said, I also thought magnets. Or just using one of those programs that wipes out the data beyond recoverability, if that's what you are after.

[techbeck]

Magnets easily. Suprised no one has said it!

 

Doesnt work.  At least I never had any luck with using a magnet.  I normally drill a few holes thru the HD

[AJerman]

You would have to have a VERY large magnet to damage a hard drive. They aren't easily susceptible to them like floppy disks were.

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

as suggested above, Zero out the drive or use some sort of Rare Earth Magnet on the device, however, if your intentions are malicious. i would recommend against doing something as this as it could come back rather poorly on you. and even end up with legal issues depending on the victim.

[Charisma Veteran]

You would have to have a VERY large magnet to damage a hard drive. They aren't easily susceptible to them like floppy disks were.

Bring it on.

 

[Tomoko]

or use some sort of Rare Earth Magnet on the device

 

Like the two powerful neodymium magnets that are inside every hard drive? :p

[guitmz]

 Use a Degausser to Erase the Hard Drive lol

[Phouchg]

^ A proper degausser will destroy track mark information. That is borderline physical damage - without taking the drive apart it's fscked.

 

To recommend either one of data remanence countermeasures (Guttman, DoD 5220.22-M etc.) is correct, but note that writing sectors reallocated by the drive itself is not possible. It's butthewl deep paranoid, but if there are many such contiguous blocks, some of that data may be extracted in a lab. In which case physical damage is the only option.

 

While making holes with a drill is certainly a great fun, it's probably a bit messy and excessive :rofl:

[WAQT]

Hello

What is the best way to ruin a mechanical hard drive without physically damaging it?

For example, SSD defragmating 1000 times over will problably ruin it yet you didn't get a hammer and smash it or anything.

 

I don't think it will, I have a 120GB SSD to which I have written over 50,000GB of data (overtime), still kicking and does not show any signs of slowing down.

Well.... maybe.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

I am not sure you are doing this in a manner that I would consider ethical, but since the mods gave the thread a thin green light I will comment.

You can destroy the drive by subjecting it to excessive shock while in operation. So doing something such as an intense data transfer to keep the drive head above the platter then to expose the drive to excessive shocked from the top or bottom. The goal being to cause a severe head crash. If done well this should give you a deep scratch across the surface of one or more platters and should destroy one or more physical drive heads.

That will get you a physically destroyed drive that has no outward physical damage appearance, but it won't securely wipe data. So I would do a secure drive erase first then on a repeat of the secure erase attempt this.

The question does beg as to why you need to accomplish this though. A secure erase of filling the drive with zeros should suffice.