I Got an Industrial Hard Drive CRUSHER! @Rack's Mobile Data Destruction System

I've heard of a company going so far in data secrecy that they destroyed their old monitors as they might contain traces of burn-in of sensitive data or something along the lines

it would be a lot faster and cheaper to just hand the drive to Linus and wait for him to drop it like he normally does

Just want to say thank you, for editing in a full audio(and visual) explanation as to the crushing failure you guys had. Very much appreciated.

When I was getting my Cybersecurity degree I took a digital forensics class and it is truly fascinating. Data destruction and recovery is such a cool topic and the tools that allow you to do data carving are a lot of fun.

Why does Linus need an expensive machine? Let him handle it for 2 minutes and he’ll drop it😂

Instant secure erase is also a very awesome feature for essentially most business and personal stuff. It’s essentially encryption and it throws out the key.

In most larger scale applications for permanent drive / data destruction they use a shredder and conveyor system in order to feed the drives in quickly, and get just a bunch of small chunks that can be recycled afterwards. But the singular drive crusher is a cool demonstration

I'm glad he made that last segment. My own server has 4 SED drives and it's ridiculously easy to wipe them because you really only have to erase the encryption key, and you can also do it as often as you want, to ensure that there's no "ghost" of the original encryption key still in Flash somewhere

When i worked IT in a gov building, our wipe program would 0 and 1 over the drive 13 times, then we would also take the electromagnet to them.

Linus please do a definitive video guide about prepping hard drives for resale or wiping specific data and have labs run the drives for recovery after to test best methods.

Nice detail addition with the failed crush. Like to see the how thoughtful y’all’ve become 👏🏻

I love when LMG makes videos like this, talking about the logistics of tech. I just got my CompTIA and Pc Pro certifications this week. this video coincidentally lined up with the last few chapters and enlightened me more on the topic of degaussing.

I had 2 dead 2.5" SSDs on hand a few weeks ago. I opened them up and used some snips to cut the chips into small shards. Kinda cathartic in a weird way.

Cool demonstration but I'm disappointed you didn't try using drives after degaussing them. I have found using manual degaussing on tapes has resulted in mixed results.

Linus being excited about something I spend sometimes 8 hours a day doing makes me feel like I'm an old person watching my grand children play with a toy I used to love as a kid.

For actual hard drives, it is super easy to simply remove the platter and run it through a dimpling machine and then cut the platter in half. It also makes it possible to sort the material for recycling. For SSD drives, it is easy to cut them up with sheet metal cutters. Backup tapes are more time consuming to destroy. I usually take the DLT tapes apart and pop the ends off the tape reel. Then cut through them with a sharp razor knife or box cutter. This creates thousands of small pieces of tape that then goes in the shredder bin.

SED drives do always encrypt even if "not enabled" so a secure erase still works regardless. Locking the drive just adds another key, which protects the encryption key, to prevent the drive from being moved between machines without first secure erasing it with the PSID printed on the drive.

I bought a 2.5" hard drive from CeX a while ago that hadn't been erased. It belonged to a medical student and had all her work and personal data on it.

Appreciate the dead body at @7:52. I'm glad the editors are having fun.

Minor correction: "NIST SP 800-88", from 2006, is the original standard where the old recommendations came from (which was a derivative of a DoD standard), and it's the newer NIST SP 800-88 Rev1 from 2014 that has more up-to-date standards that are relevant for modern media. The original standard was particularly unscientific and was largely written to satiate the paranoia of military types; Peter Gutmann, the guy who the ridiculous 35-pass wipe system was named after, once described the standard as a bunch of "voodoo incantations". The modern Rev1 standard is much better, with clear actionable advice around different media technologies, and even makes it clear where recommendations have been upgraded beyond what is reasonably necessary just for the sake of peace of mind.