Even though we aim to do our bit to save everyday items from the landfill, there are the odd occasions where we have to do a little destruction in our workshops! Today, we had a customer who needed an SSD upgrade for a laptop. They were concerned that their data might leak so asked us to destroy the old hard drive to prevent data from being read. We bound the hard drive to a clamp, and got started with physical destruction!
Attempting data destruction
So, Gareth grabbed a couple of nails, while I grabbed a hammer. Making sure I had a pair of safety goggles on beforehand (safety first, of course!), I tried my hand at hammering the nail through the metal casing. In both cases, the nail flew off out of my grasp. Hopefully nothing got damaged by the wayward nails!
Next, we tried drilling through the metal casing. It turned out the casing was tougher than we thought, as the drill just wasn’t going through. I figured at this point that if we can’t go through the metal casing, then we can try drilling through the circuit board instead.
I turned the hard drive circuit board side up on the clamp, and started drilling through the hard drive. After a few tries, I did manage to break the platter inside the hard drive. The job took a little while, but we managed to complete the job!
Oh, and just to make sure that data recovery really is impossible, Gareth drove a large screw into the hard drive through the PCB with the electric drill. As you can see in the above photo, it was fairly comical seeing the hard drive impaled like this!