With help from Marc, Dan and Lee, I learned a really bad – albeit effective – way to format a hard drive yesterday:
It turns out that:
- It’s a lot easier than you’d expect to snap hard disks.
- They break into many, many little pieces that fly everywhere.
- And the pieces are extremely sharp.
If you’re wondering whether we take our data security seriously, yes, we do. That’s my personal blood on the disc pieces and the desk.
I don’t recommend trying this.
As you discovered, many drive platters are actually made of glass rather than metal. Glass is lighter weight than metal and easier to polish to a virtually perfectly smooth surface. I’m glad nobody was seriously injured! At my last job, we had a user who dropped her laptop down a set of concrete stairs, shattering the platters inside the drive into what sounded like thousands of tiny glass shards. On the up side, she had a nice maraca to play at the talent show.
As the guy who thought the drive was metal and gave it a bend, I’ll agree that this goes onto the list of “bad ideas.” Seriously, the thing exploded like a frag grenade. I got a sliver in one of my fingers and there were little knife shaped fragments EVERYWHERE in my office.
Now I won’t say that it wasn’t cool
. That would be a lie. I mean it EXPLODED – how cool is that? But I wouldn’t do it again without some protective gear (goggles and gloves mainly.)
Video or it didn’t happen.
Seriously I hope you’re OK Marc!
A tech whose opinion I trust says that the safe way to render a hard drive unreadable (which is, I assume, what you were trying to do) is to donate an old drill bit you don’t care about any more to the effort, and pop a hole right through case and all with an electric drill — or preferably a drill press. I’ll be giving that a try soon with a couple of old drives.
Funny picture but it looks a little fake given all the screws are in the picture!
Good bye Ilium. After using your software for years I am leaving because I’m tired of waiting for the ewallet for mac software to come out. I’m buying a competitors version today.
Ouch. I didn’t know that hd platters were made of glass, should I ever get the impulse to destroy a hard disk I will beware…