Decommissioned a Hard Drive with 44 magnums

About a year ago my cat jumped up to the top shelf where I had my media room external hard drive located thinking it to be safe. I was copying files to it so I guess the blinking blue light on it just got Dexter's attention so he went for it. He knocked it off that high shelf and I heard it from the other room. Sure enough, when I hooked it back up it was giving me that whirrr clunk, whirrr clunk of a mechanically damaged hard drive. I had about 500gb of movies, music, pdf files on every subject I have ever been interested in. Finally got tired of looking at it so it was time to destroy the drive. Knowing I could not erase the drive and not feeling like taking it apart we descided to take the drive out back to the pasture and put some 44 magnum holes into it firing from a Henry Bigboy Repeating Rifle. This is what we typically use for ferral pigs around here. I don't know if this is up to DOD specs for drive destruction but I think it will do.

Target Face

Target Exit

a reply to: machineintelligence

Look, if this post isn't considered coded nonsense, I don't know what is.

Seems a reasonable end.

a reply to: machineintelligence

Probably could still pull together quite a bit of data off that drive with only a few holes in it. I bring mine to a computer recycler. Costs about 10$ per drive to get them shredded and i get to watch.

a reply to: machineintelligence

What's your cat's name?

a reply to: machineintelligence
You might get ahold of Hidabeast and ask her how she destroyed her hard drives.

How hard can it be to take a few screws out and grind/sand the plates? (You could degausse the plates by placing them between neodymium magnets before grinding their surfaces if you really don't want anybody getting your old data)

I can see how this would be way more satifying but picking up the mess is a b...

Peace

originally posted by: Mach2
a reply to: machineintelligence

What's your cat's name?

Dexter.

He said it in the OP.

I built a foundry- and melt 'em down. Great for reducing scrap into usable ingots, too!
Although I work in the field and had probably been sitting on 300 disks for a year before I got around to building the scrapper to reduce them.


DOD could still recover some stuff off that, surprisingly- but nothing worth their effort.

Hope you had a second copy of that data. Hard disks are notoriously good at losing important stuff. I need to improve my own backup strategy...

a reply to: machineintelligence

What kind of ""movies"" require 44 magnum rounds to be ""decommissioned""?

originally posted by: operation mindcrime
How hard can it be to take a few screws out and grind/sand the plates? (You could degausse the plates by placing them between neodymium magnets before grinding their surfaces if you really don't want anybody getting your old data)

Say what? Who wants to go through all that when you can just go, "Boom! Boom!" WTF is wrong with you?

a reply to: schuyler

In my corner of the world "boom! Boom!" is a "no!no!"...

Not saying I'm not jealous though...

Peace

I've got about 20 or so hard drives I have to "recycle".

Between an old server swap out at home and a bunch at work, they are starting to stack up.

I figured I'd tape them all together into a big brick and shoot them once(efficiency and all that).

a reply to: machineintelligence

If you kill it you got to eat it you really think that was bacon Dexter was cooking

a reply to: machineintelligence

I dunno, thats a pretty loose group bro. Take it out to 50 yards and give it another 6+1

originally posted by: MisterSpock
I've got about 20 or so hard drives I have to "recycle".

Between an old server swap out at home and a bunch at work, they are starting to stack up.

I figured I'd tape them all together into a big brick and shoot them once(efficiency and all that).

May I suggest Gorilla taping the hard drives around a fist size ball of tannerite...and then a nice .45-70

a reply to: Mach2

Dexter

a reply to: andy06shake

Mostly torrent downloads over the years.

a reply to: schuyler

Solving your minutia with a gun.. glad you werent pick on in school.

a reply to: MisterSpock

Shoot it. Shoooot it. Guns aren't the problem, not being able to shoot things is!

Lol.. tomorrow. Another mind fuxed manboy shoots 12 students at his school. We think antidepressants were involved.

Meh, what do I know.. I'm australian..