Now... 
you tell me!!!!!
Gadzooks! I think... 
Lindsay Lohan gave me rust!
Posted on 09/18/2007 6:57:56 PM PDT by devane617
U.S. Residents will throw away more than 500 million personal computers this year.
But information on the computer's hard drive can come back to haunt the machine's former owner, so a Tampa company, Viatek Solutions, specializes in destroying computer parts.
The company uses an industrial hammermill that pulverizes computer hard drives into tiny pieces no bigger than a dime.
"Any material is unidentifiable once it goes through this machine," said employee Mark Cardamone. "What it was originally, whether it be a hard drive, tape drive or circuit board, it's totally destroyed along with the serial number associated with it."
Viatek Solutions president Brian Loftin said that simply throwing away a hard drive puts its former owner at risk.
"It's no different than throwing away a credit card bill or anything with your Social Security number on it," Loftin said. "It's not so much the material is hazardous. It's more the information than anything."
Viatek Solutions says the cost of recycling a computer hard drive and monitor runs $5 to $10.
Awhile back I queried Google as to how to make a hard drive safe to dispose of. A fellow poster said take a cutting torch to the hard drive. The person said that was the safest way they knew of to get rid of a hard drive. I do like the way mentioned above if I ever used a service like that described in this article it would have to be with the understanding that I would be allowed to observe my equipment be destroyed.
On a monthly basis here in my community the city offer a drop off service for old computer equipment. I am amazed at the huge pile of old computers at the end on the collection day. Rarely do you see on with the case off. I use a large hammer before disposing computer equipment.
They also make software like Window Washer that cat "wipe" the disk clean by writing Os over every part of the disk multiple times to make the info unrecoverable. There are different specifications such as DOD 5220.22-M, NSA, Guttman governing how many times the Data is overwritten, more times being more secure.
Doesn't pass the smell test. I haven't thrown away even one, much less two PCs this year.
We have a couple of boxes with old HDs. Each HD has a pacemaker magnet clinging tightly to it. I’ve checked a few of the HD’s and find no evidence of data. One of these days I’ll get around to destroying them.
DBAN does a pretty serious job of wiping your old hard drive, and it is free. Note that it takes about 2 hours to do a 127GB drive:
Now... you tell me!!!!!
Gadzooks! I think... Lindsay Lohan gave me rust!
M112 Block (1.25lbs) of C-4 pretty much reduces each of my old hard drives to unreadable.
The brissance solution to a simple problem.
Course I will retire in a few so will need alternate solutions eventually.
No, it doesn't pass the smell test.
I'm in my fifties and have never thrown away a computer. The old ones are all in the closet or are being used to hold planters.
Hell, my old Kaypros and Apple II's didn't even have hard drives.
Funny thing is that the first hard drive I ever owned, Windows 1990? maybe 8 GB, still works. It has my master's thesis on it. In WordStar.
Disk storage is still a magnetic medium, and a bulk demagnetizer would scramble a hard drive so that nothing logical was readable.
I still have a VIC20 in the closet.
Back in the late 80's, I worked for a company that had a mainframe computer. One day we got in a string of used 3380 drives (as tall and deep as a refrigerator and several times as wide). The IBM customer engineers installed them physically and cabled them to the system, but did not make them known to the operating system (our job).
Being the curious sort, I booted up a virtual test system and attached the drives to it. It turned out they had belonged to a software company, whose headquarters was ten miles down the freeway, that marketed a popular payroll system costing several hundred thousand dollars. The drives contained a full copy of that system, complete with data tables for the fifty states and assorted other junk.
The following day, our systems guy formatted them and genned them into the production OS.
A 14 round clip from a .22 rendered my old drive useless.
Remembrance of Data Passed: Used Disk Drives and Computer Forensics
Among the conclusions: Drive slagging works.
Company I work for gets rid of them by the truck load. Have no idea how many each year but the number is up there.
I had a pile of three computer/monitor systems laying in a junk pile out back. I figured a few years of weeds, rain, and mice eventually made them dead, but I sledged them anyway before boxing them up and throwing them into a construction dumpster.
But the population of the US is only around 301 million & that’s counting babies & octagenerians.
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