I’m on NPR!
February 23rd, 2009I never thought this topic would be my debut on All Things Considered.
A couple of weeks ago they called Heather and once the technical questions started, Heather asked if they could talk to me.
How To Erase Old Hard Drives Without A Drill Bit : NPR
I’ve got two more drives to remove. If I can’t, it’s the drill. How do you handle old drives? o
Used to work at an IT firm. Boss was very security-focussed. We always physically destroyed HDDs and didn’t just rely on software erasing or zeroing programs. Too many successful data recoveries performed on supposedly dead drives.
Once upon a time a local paper shredding company would shred them for us. Yes, the HDDs. A drill bit sounds like an excellent tool.
Also, yay you on NPR!
Yay for you and boo for them for “docce.com”!
Jon! I heard you and Heather! On NPR! Which I listen to obsessively. I was washing my dogs and had the radio on and there you were! It was absurdly exciting for me. Sort of a worlds-are-colliding sort of thing. NPR AND the blogs I read. Really, in my world, you have reached the pinnacle of success.
Yeah – would have been REALLY cool if they had spelled the web site name correctly. Oops…
dammit! I typically listen to NPR all day, but have been listening to my ipod today & must have missed your interview! congrats ~ that’s awesome!
p.s. you have a sexy voice!
I didn’t miss it! Being in Alaska & a part of the last time zone in the country has its advantages
I have a highly reputable and discreet exorcist who performs the necessary rituals. Bring three hard drives and the incense is free!
That’s so rad!
Gratz Jon.
OH NOOOOOOO! The one day I miss All Things Considered and I miss my two favorite bloggers…. Damn you new obsession with The Hush Sound.
I listen to this every day when I leave work. It’s a good thing I was off today because I totally would have shouted, “OMG! It’s Dooce! And Blurb! On NPR! All my worlds are colliding!” And then I would have collided with a tree or another car.
This way was much safer.
I have never used it myself, but here at work we use DBAN. It is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hdd of most computers. At home I have used Spybot S&D, which has a file shredding algorithm utility built in (or at least it used to, have not had a need for it since switching to Mac). Which is doable to clean a whole disk, but not as convenient as a boot disk. After that, since I am on the paranoid side I drill 3 to 4 holes through them. Side note, vendors generally accept one hole through the platters as being sufficiently destroyed.
From reading the interview (I am assuming that the old disks are EIDE), I would get an external hdd case, slap the old hdd in that then plug it into the Mac via usb/firewire, then just use the Mac disk utility to wipe and reformat the disk. Then drill the disks and off they go to the recyclers or trash.
BTW, congrats on the NPR interview.
Now that I think about it, “docce.com” could be an AWESOME blog featuring Italian design and fashion. You’ve already got an experienced model in Chuck; how much extra work could it be?
Oh awesome, heading over to listen now!
I was excited to hear my favorite blogger and my favorite photographer on my favorite radio program. Y’all did great!
Congrats on making it to ATC!
Forget the drill bit, run that drive through the snowblower!
You can use a number of different utilities to wipe drives, some of which have been mentioned. You can do a full DoD-spec 7-pass wipe if you like, but I have a friend that has an ongoing experiment that makes me think it’s probably overkill. He has contacted a number of data recovery firms about recovering a drive that has been zero-written, paying them the usual fee and such, and none of them will take it.
Whoo hooo! Rock on Captain Clog!
Extremely cool that you made NPR! Major kudos!
When I was laid off from my last job in December, I had to return the Mac Book Pro I had been using at home and at work. I found that the Disk Utilities application included w/OS X has a utility that will perform “DoD” level zero outs on the open space of any designated drive. It will even go so far was to overwrite the drive up to 35 times. To make sure I didn’t have any lingering personal/financial data, I ran it through twice. It took about 13 hours to wipe the 160 (I think) GB drive.
Shortly thereafter, I saw a link to an article on Slashdot.org that indicated even the pseudo-standard 7 pass zero out is overkill for all intents and purposes.
I would imagine you could use the same utility for any drive which you could mount on the Mac. Just hook it up via USB or some other method, do a quick format, then run it through the zero out procedure and BINGO!