Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[ryan14]

Hi, I have 2 suggestions for Seagate Hard Drives:

1)Lots of people throw their old hard drives in the rubbish bin without deleting all their personal information from it, so a feature new Seagate hard drives should have is, a small rechargable battery(uses same power source as hard drive to recharge) attached to each hard drive, then when a person wants to throw away their hard drive, they push a button, and an electric charge fries the hard drive and platters, which will make the hard drive completely un-readable.

 The hard drive shouldn't catch fire or electrocute the person holding it,and if a person accidentely uses the feature while the hard drive is still connected to the computer then there should be some protection against this and also some power surge protection too.

2)Seagate should start making 2TB SSD(solid state drives) and also put the electric charge feature as i described above in it too. Also, the SSD drives should come with on-the-fly encryption too.

Can you please pass on my suggestions to the Seagate staff?

Thanks

[Cantbecanit]

Ryan, if you are worried about security there is an easier way, find an old loudspeaker and break it open, then use the magnet on the back of it, just plonk it on the hdd and leave it for a few days, check it no longer boots then you can dispose of it, or unscrew the drive and put a sander across the platters.

[graham.k]

I don't know how feasible the "zap" idea is, but it certainly sounds dangerous. I've seen cases where very large magnets have no effect on the data integrity of a hard drive, so I don't recommend that either.

My favourite solution is to use the Linux "wipe" utility, which overwrites the entire drive with random crud repeatedly so as to make the original data unrecoverable.

[Cantbecanit]

Fair call Graham, but I've recovered stuff that went 3-4 formats ago and been written over as well, I think the only real solution is to physically strip the drive and grind away the platter surface.

[graham.k]

In many cases a "format" is non-destructive. Even a "full format" doesn't actually initialize each sector -- it merely verifies that each sector is readable, which is intended to serve as a form of media verification. This is the same as what CHKDSK /R does.

If you read what the "wipe" program does, you can tell that someone has put some thought into it.

http://wipe.sourceforge.net/

Of course, I can't argue with the effectiveness of physical destruction either.

[HughR]

I think that the recommended way of securely erasing a drive is to use thermite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite.

If you are less paranoid, you could try to use the ATA "secure erase" command.  Apparently every IDE/ATA/SATA drive made since 2000  has this capability.  I've never tried this.

Here's a Linux-centric explanation that seems quite useful: http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

Here's a more generic, high-level discussion:  http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2006/07/hard-drive-secure-erase/

P.S. Seagate doesn't actually pay attention to what we say here.  We're talking amongst ourselves.

Message Edited by HughR on 2009-06-02 05:17 PM

[AlanM]

Well, Seagate does pay attention, but Tech Support is not active in the forum for the most part.

I had a comment about idea #2 - solid-state drives are significantly more expensive than spinning-platter hard drives, at least at this point in the development of technology.  So, wow, a 2 TB SSD would be really expensive!  Much moreso than a 2 TB hard drive, which you can get for around $230 all over the place.  

That's probably one of the reasons why you don't see too many 2 TB SSD around - the price would be prohibitive.

[AlanM]

I just saw this article as well and thought it might be of interest to the readers of this thread.