OT: Disposing Old Computer Parts

[tleslie]

I use the hammer approach.
But I intially didn't wear eye protection
and was fortunate to get hit hard in the cheek first to
wake me up to that fact. (by flying pieces of disk).
I actually put the disks in a cloth sack and wail on them with a
heavy framing hammer, and forgo the eye protection.
This did the trick!

I am thinking for those who are in an apartment or don't have a heavy
hammer ...
what cheap chemical would wreck a disk?
pool acid? or maybe something that would oxidize it quick?

I am thinking there should be a product,
something with a plastic bin, and a chemical,
and you put the disk in , add chemical, shake,
and 10 minutes later, a unrecoverable hard drive!!
Preferably with a "green chemical".

-tl




On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 15:47 -0400, Mike Oliver wrote:
> Quoting Sheldon Mustard <smustard-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
> 
> > On 6/6/07, Kevin Cozens <kevin-4dS5u2o1hCn3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >> Sheldon Mustard wrote:
> >> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024
> >>
> >> That is a very poor way to wipe a disk. The data will still be recoverable
> >> with the right hardware/tools. Most of the programs designed to make data
> >> unrecoverable include several passes where random data is written to 
> >> the disk.
> >> IIRC, you need at least six different writes of data to truly make the
> >> information unrecoverable.
> >
> > Yes good call, so several (maybe 10 or 15) passes with /dev/random then.
> 
> That will take a *looong* time, unless it's a really small HDD.  The
> idea of /dev/random is that it doesn't output bits faster than it
> can accumulate entropy (from keystrokes, disk start times, etc).  So
> it's quite slow.  Unless you're up against the NSA or equivalent, I'd think
> using /dev/urandom instead should be adequate.  If you *are* up against
> the NSA I don't want to know about it.
> 
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