Data Drive meets Mr Plasma Cutter!
What data remains on our old & defunct gear?
Recently replaced a couple more work computers, one for family with a new machine and one of my odds & ends machines.
I had no idea what was on the relatives machine, but expect it included notes on their banking & investments.
Mine was likely no more revealing than listing my bookmarks and the password manager’s supposedly encrypted password list.
But the work machines may have contained competitive, health, and personal identification information, and really needed to be flushed or destroyed “just in case.”
Wanting avoid mounting the removed drives and endless running one of the scrubbing programs, we reverted to physical means.
I’d found the “sledgehammer method” seriously lacking and prone to springs whipping about the shop with some drives.
So our shop plasma cutter was used.
The plasma cutter simply sliced the physical drive units in half. Zip-zip.
Running 8K VAC at 2 MHz through the drives won’t have been unnoticed by the drive components not sliced.
Good enough destruction.
Photo documenting the destruction is useful. These are family/personal drives.
[It is worth remembering that HD and SSDs are used where you might not expect to find them. Photocopiers usually have one, some printers, even some of our ham radio gear, and of course lots of IT world components. Whether these drives contain protectable information depends on what they have been used for. And SSDs also slice up very nicely, just saying…]
73
Steve
K9ZW
With Varying Frequency - Amateur Radio Ponderings 
An old fashion Oxyacetylene cutting torch will do the same, just takes a lil longer.
As Plasma pushes so much electrical power through the circuits and across the media it does double duty.
None of these methods as we apply them would be correct for serious data protection of course.
Another plus on the Plasma Cutter – it was fun! Very quick too!
73
Steve
K9ZW