2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2016–2022score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points to it whenever hard drive destruction or fast physical data wiping comes up, as an empirical test of what actually works.
Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.
“Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs” (HN, 2016)
There was an interesting experiment done on this at a DEFCON a few years back[1]. Thermite, even the more explosive copper-based variant, is pretty poor at destroying disk platters, sadly. Explosives or cutting equipment seem to be better, although the magnitude of the engineering challenge obviously increases. 1: [this video]
Experiments destroying hard drives with thermite and explosives.
Hard disks are surprisingly hard to destroy on-demand. There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods. [1] [this video]
Physical methods for quickly wiping servers in situ.
there was a defcon talk where they tested multiple methods for rapid hard drive erasure, in the event of a raid on a data center. a bomb range they visited happened to have a few of these leftover and [this video]
Tests of multiple rapid hard drive erasure methods.
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