Secure Data Destruction On Hard Drives
The Range Squirrel
For quite a few years have been a computer tinkerer, first with my own PCs and then as a micro-business for awhile. In the process of upgrading and repairing computers I acquired a stack of hard drives that had been erased. D.B.A.N., aka Darik’s Boot And Nuke is my go to utility for securely erasing hard drives before disposal. D.B.A.N., an Open Source project is still totally free, BLANNCO now ‘owns’ it and tries to move you to their commercial product. I highly recommend the free version. Occasionally a drive goes intermittent and D.B.A.N. won’t work, but it ‘might’ spin up one last time. I don’t want my customer’s data to possibly be exposed, so physical destruction is the route I take.
So I had an accumulation of drives that had been D.B.A.N.’d and some had had SpinRite disk utility run on them with the thought that I might build a N.A.S. box with a bunch of disparate size drives, build a home entertainment PC or some other yet unforeseen use. But in reality they where just sitting on a shelf in the garage collecting dust, and they were too small for any good use.
I have also physically destroyed a few drives by drill press, acetylene torch, 9mm and .223, but now that the 7.62×39 AR-15 was up and running …. it’s time for an experiment.
Sorry the destruction afterward wasn’t entirely visible in the video, apparently what I see on screen is cropped in the actual video; I should have had it centered, not on the periphery.
The 7.62×39 indeed makes bigger holes, but the drives are just as unreadable when struck by a .223 or 9mm; although I’ve had 9mm rounds that did not go completely through before. The 9mm does destroy the platters, but just bludgeons the back wall of the drives.
I owned a Marlin 60 since 1987, but never really got ‘into’ guns until 2011 when I bought my first 9mm pistol. That was soon followed by a .380 and a 12 guage pump, and I was all in. I had done some 20 guage reloading growing up, and threw myself into 9mm and .223 reloading in 2017, .380 in 2019, 7.62×39 in 2020 and my first revolver in 45 Colt in 2022. It is so satisfying to go to the range and string together ever improving groups with ammo I loaded myself; it doesn’t hurt that I’m a little OCD about technical things, the tangible/visible rewards are really gratifying.
I have a nagging but as yet unattained ‘want’ for a .358 Yeti unloader, it just looks like a really cool caliber. My next learning curve, space permitting, is casting and coating.