mike hoy said:
> Hi
>
> If somebody wanted to completely destroy a harddrive or flash drive so
> that no data whatsoever could ever be extracted from it how would they
> go about doing that?
>
> example:
>
> your an owner of a small company with sensitive information on your
> hardrive and you can no longer use the drive because it's broken.
>
> can you soak it in acid or break it into bits and pieces..
>
> is there anyway to do this?
>
> My emphasis here is on absolute destruction of the hard disk or flash
> disk or zip disk or even a cdrom.
>
> If the hardrive were still useable would a format be sufficient to wipe
> the data?
>
> I've heard that formatting the hdd's don't actually erase all of the
> data.

Physical destruction and scattering the pieces is the only way to insure
the data cannot be read.  The government and military have specifications
for different levels of "secure erase" for media devices.  Everyone of
them specifies physical destruction as the only 100% way.

- Hard drives: disassemble, demagnitize and break/cut/shatter the platters.
- Zip: as with hard drives.
- CDROM: Baking in UV light (if CD-R) and then break etc.
- Flash: Break/cut/shatter the silicon die inside each chip.

In every case above, scatter the pieces by putting them in different trash
cans, on different days, etc. so that re-assembly is essentially
impossible.

There are other non-destructive things to be reasonably sure that the data
is not retrievable but the device can still be used when you are done. 
But, if you want to be *sure* the data is out of reach, detruction is the
only way.

Alan



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