[clug] Hard disk destruction

[Sam Couter]

Brendan Jurd <direvus at gmail.com> wrote:
> We tried putting a platter in the embers of a backyard fire, which
> succeeded in making the platter glow red.  This looked cool, and *may*
> have ruined the data on the disk, but the disk was not even slightly
> deformed and I didn't really feel like it was a sure thing.

It's not clear from your photo, but are they glass or aluminium? A good
campfire will soften and melt aluminium, at which point the data is
gone. Glass won't deform but may break due to thermal stress, and
depending on the magnetic media it may not be above the the Curie
temperature.

Curie temperatures of many materials manufactured for magnetic media:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=454159

Glass is more susceptible to the pulverise-with-a-hammer method which
can be good destructive fun but also kinda dangerous and messy.

How hot was your fire? You can tell from the colour of the glowing
disks:

http://hearth.com/econtent/index.php/wiki/Temperature_when_metal_glows_red

What's your threat model? Those platters are already out of the drive
in a non-clean environment so they're already rediculously expensive to
recover. Do you really have information that important?
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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