[GTALUG] Ten grand for this?

[David Collier-Brown]

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 at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain