The sadness of sending gear to electronics recycling

[John Vere]

I was a School Bus driver and one day we showed up at work and one whole indoor parking bay was full off pallets all piled with all the old computers from the entire school district.  Possible 300 computers or more. 
I asked the manager what they were going to do with them and he said they can’t scrap them until all the hard drives were removed and destroyed. 
I made them a deal. I’ll do it for free and salvage rites. 
There were a lot of those little coloured Macs that are rounded I think they call them Bondi’sThere we’re a million IBM think things. Big huge Commodore tank’s Servers and so on. They let me use the garage space. I set up a table and with a powered Philips screw driver, and a hammer I proceeded to disembowel them all. 
The tech guy said all had been wiped and most stuff had been on the servers. But the hard drive needed to be destroyed. 
They were mostly 10 GB anyway. I simply hit the end with a hammer which knocked the circuit board off the bottom. 
I kept a few of the new 40 GB data drives. I think 60 GB was the biggest you could get back then 1998? 
But I managed to remove a lot of RAM and put it on eBay. I made over $1,500 on RAM alone. Especially the stuff from the old servers. 
I also re imaged the little apples and sold them to happy people for $20 each. Turns out Apple parts fit in PC so more RAM and weird stuff that I made a few buck on too. I kept a Mac Server. It was a beast. 
I rebuilt a bunch of the little IBM boxes as well and because of the collection of parts they were good little office computers I sold complete with keyboard mouse and monitor for $40.  
But a lot of perfectly good stuff went to recycling. At a certain point sales fell off. 

[bitflipper]

My biggest freebie score was a 6-foot tall rack, when my office closed down in 1993. All the furniture got snapped up, but I was the only one with a pickup who could haul away the rack. I ended up gifting it to a buddy of mine who had a proper recording studio and enough stuff to actually fill it up.

[Starship Krupa]

Just ask the data recovery service representatives who comment on the DIY "how to repair your hard drive" videos on YouTube.

According to them, all you need to to is take the lid off outside of a clean room and your drive will be rendered irreparably unreadable forever.

That's it, no magnets, no spikes, just pop the lid off and it instantly destroys it.

[X-53mph]

Jeez! Reading your posts makes me wonder what you guys keep on those hard drives. 😅

[mettelus]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

That's it, no magnets, no spikes, just pop the lid off and it instantly destroys it.

As someone who engineered and oversaw production on HDDs that statement is 100% NOT TRUE. YouTube is rife with idiots, so be very careful as to what you read/watch, and never assume you are an expert because you read something online.

A HDD head literally flies roughly 1 micro-inch from the platter, so even a molecule of tobacco smoke can rip the head off (that is 100% true, and why de-lidding them voids any warranty). However, that does nothing to the data on the platter (with the small exception for where the head impacted). Once the hysteresis curve has been set, the platter will maintain data until another magnetic field overdrives that. The platters are basically optical flats with an oil coating on them, so you could also optionally use a degreaser on them and spray them with acid to prevent a head read (rust the crap out of them). Unless you have data on your drives that will get you sent to prison, it is sort of moot anyway; no one else but law enforcement is going to waste the time trying to get data off of old drives.

We had an engineer that would play games and de-lid drives then run them on his desk to see how long they would run before the heads crashed, it actually took a lot longer than we expected.

[John Vere]

This is it . What little info some one would be after that will be on a hard drive would most certainly not be worth it. 
I thought my method of smashing the circuit board off and tossing it in the electrical recycling bin. And then separating the rest and putting it in the metal recycling bin which goes to a different location here was more less as safe as I am from being hit by a meteorite. 
I tried drilling but it was too much work. That steel is tough. 

Edited January 14 by John Vere

[craigb]

When the power grid goes down for several months, the data on your hard drives will not rank very high on your concerns!

Just sayin'...

[bitflipper]

Yes, it doesn't take much to render a conventional drive inoperational. But "operational" means running it in the normal fashion - connecting it to a controller and letting the O/S figure out where stuff is. There are indeed very small tolerances in there, and not just the tiny height that the heads fly over the platter. There is also a tiny stepper motor in there with a plastic actuator held on by screws the size of the ones in your glasses frames. The drives I worked on had linear accelerators - picture the coils in a speaker but with a 10" throw - that could be destroyed by dust or vibration.

So it's true that a particle of smoke can indeed ruin a drive as far as you or I are concerned. However, if you are, say, the CIA, or anybody else with a great deal of patience, it's still possible to recover data even after it's been damaged. As a last resort, there is a fluid that can be applied to the oxide that makes data visible  to the eye under a microscope.

My company used to sell hardware to the military and the 3-letter agencies. I had to learn about stuff like that in order to be certified for high-security installations. Did you know they can watch what you're typing by picking up electromagnetic leakage from the keyboard cable? Imagine working in a Faraday cage. No listening to the radio for you!

Fortunately, I never had to do a DOD install myself, only read up on it just in case. I had no desire to install a system whilst guys with guns watched. Out here in civilian land, it was mostly banks that were paranoid. Had to get my badge altered just to go the bathroom. But they were too clueless to think anything of it when I wheeled an HDA full of bank accounts right out the front door.

[Shane_B.]

10 hours ago, bitflipper said:

My company used to sell hardware to the military and the 3-letter agencies.

Your post reminds me of when I worked in Des Moines IA. I had to service machines at the Federal building there as well as a bank, and an insurance company. The bank had an entire floor at the top of the business area of the tallest building in the city. The 2 topper most top floors were reserved and private.

You had a shadow with you from the ground floor, till you were done, and back out. I'm not sure what they did there but it was a cubicle farm with huge monitors around the entire room.

But, the place with the highest security was the insurance company.

I couldn't get a security pass there. Most vendors didn't. They had extremely tight rules. Tighter than the feds and the banks which I thought was very odd.

Years later W.F. built an enormous new campus there in DSM. They locked that down tighter than Bap's bass strings. You had to be escorted from your car until you were done and back to the car.

When hard drives started becoming a thing in multifunction copiers, I had to install a lot of data encryption boards that would encrypt and wipe the drives because everything goes to the HDD on bigger machines. Copies, faxes, scans, prints. I really don't know how effective it was if someone really wanted to get the data though. I think once it's there, there's probably always a way to get it off no matter what you do.

The safest way to communicate used to be by fax until everything went to VoIP. There are no true land lines anymore. At some point, somewhere, VoIP is involved and anyone with the knowhow can intercept. Kinda like a party line from back in the old days. 

[craigb]

*Pfft!*  Those secret places don't even exist!  Don't believe me?  Just ask them!  😁