Wednesday, June 07

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Daily News Stuff 7 June 2023

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Disclaimer: Bats! Bats in my face!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 354 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Looks like your page has been dropping acid again.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, June 07 2023 07:35 PM (rglbH)

2 When our library is disposing of an old machine we sometimes wipe the hard drive(s).  With an old, whirling-rust drive of 250G this takes about 3 hours per pass.  Now, it's true, I can just turn it on, start the wipe, and go do other things, but to effectively destroy that same drive takes all of 30 seconds and costs virtually zero electricity.  And if you're a massive datacenter with hundreds or thousands of drives to dispose of per year I can't see the maths working any other way, really.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 07 2023 09:32 PM (obo9H)

3 Long ago and far away, a friend of mine was at the Stanford Research Institute, maintaining servers for a project that dealt in classified data of some variety. When it came time to dispose of hard drives, she called to ask what method was acceptable. After being transferred around multiple times, she finally found someone who could give an authoritative answer:

"It's really easy, just take the drives outside, wait for a tank to come by, and place them in front of the treads."

She explained that they didn't have any tanks at her office. Long pause, "...then what are you doing with that kind of data!?" She explained what SRI did, and he eventually agreed that magnetic scrubbing was acceptable if they had strong enough magnets.

"We have a cyclotron, will that do?"

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 07 2023 11:06 PM (oJgNG)

4 Here at "big expensive diesel engine sales and services", I dispose of them using the multi-ton Metal Muncher brand shear/punch/press machine out in our machine shop, very very satisfying and ain't no real easy way to put that puppy back together, not sure what those platters are made of on the old mechanicals but they shatter like safety glass.

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:03 AM (YBLgY)

5 Disclaimer: Bats!  Bats in my face!

Now see? that's why Mr Thompson said not to pull over there, its bat country!

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:09 AM (YBLgY)

6 In my limited experience, consumer drives reach an age of senescence, where they just run slower and slower, like a cheap QLC SSD that's exhausted its write cache and is now slowly dripping data onto the platter, with 100% activity time, and access times measured in seconds instgead of milliseconds.  I dunno why you'd wanna reuse something that worn out.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:43 AM (BMUHC)

7 Back in the day, not that long ago, classified HDDs were melted down to liquid. Try to get data from that!

Posted by: Raster at Thursday, June 08 2023 07:20 AM (VAiJm)

8 When I worked in a SCIF back in 1994, we had ancient hard drives with enormous, I want to say 12" platters, that the techs would remove, and then we'd run a powerful magnet over them before dumping them into a metal shredder. I imagine there was no concern about any cache on those drives.
We had a stack to destroy every month or so that came from another office, and I have to hope they were replacing the ancient drives, not putting in fresh platters on some rotating cycle.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:19 AM (oHlLc)

9 Well, "modern" hard-drives (everything I've seen since around 2004 or slightly earlier) seem to do just fine with magnets being waved around them.  I'm pretty sure the medium needs really strong, local (like 0.01" or 0.001") magnetism to have any effect on the platters.  Hell, the newer stuff (HAMR etc) needs a heating element in the head to change anything.  I'd be satisfied with crushing (16lb hammers are cheap enough), shredding (metal shredders aren't too horribly expensive), or melting (toss into nearby volcano, like a good Hobbitses), as above, but the "waving a magnet around" method doesn't inspire confidence.  Though, I guess a cyclotron might be a good start.  7.62x54, 7.62x56, or 7.62x51 seem decent as well.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:45 AM (obo9H)

10 the break in the formatting looks like it might be before the japan article

I dunno.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:33 AM (r9O5h)

11 Sorry about the busted page.  Using this editor with Chrome it likes to insert random <div> elements inside BBCode, which ends up with overlapping tags.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 08 2023 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

12 Don't you just love tools that think they know what you want better than you do smile

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:19 PM (rglbH)

13 I was noticing that the first paragraph of any new blog post didn't HAVE a div tag, unless I inserted a few lines before it and deleted them. Played hob with my blank line formatting.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 09 2023 10:22 AM (BzEjn)

14 I'm going to experiment with new editors this weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 09 2023 11:14 AM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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