cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40679506
So for Friday night, myself and my friends got rather board. And as the resident “Things collector” i got 2 Maxtor touch sense 2 external hardrives. However those who were alive in 2000’s know Maxtor went bankrupt and haven’t made hardrives for a very long time. One of these drive i got BRAND NEW, in box at a flea market. sadly time got to the platters first, i spent a few hours trying to reformat or partition them and all i got was write errors. I tried different utility’s with no avail and decided to cut my losses, so i asked the boys what we should do with them? Immediately my friend had an idea, to bring out his 9mm and see how a hardrive would fair! We all took turns and they were pretty hard to hit (we made the mistake of drink soda before hand). We eventually landed some shots on the center of the drives and MAN it actually stopped 2 bullets!!!
going into this we all expected the disk to be unreadable after the fact, but didnt think the hardrives would stop a 9mm bullet!!
We then took the hdd’s apart after are volley of bullets, and alot of the chips were damaged and all the platters were bent. But when we took off the top case, it looked so freakin cool i had to keep it
My preferred method, just one hit:
I am a huge fan of that hammer
It looks cool, but that is a horrible handle. You want it to be wood or plastic so it dampens vibrations as much as it can, and smooth so one hand can slide down the handle from near the head to your other hand at the end as you swing. A couple minutes breaking up concrete with that and your hands would be numb, tingly, and probably bloody. Gloves would help, but using this will always suck.
This is also the officially supported US Government way. Not lying. I worked for a VAR with NASA and DHS contracts. Bad hard drives were bashed with a sledge like this before the top plate was sent to the manufacturer for RMA.
Must be great stress relieve for the folks that do it as a side gig.
It really, really is. Like that scene from Office Space.
Those old school drives were built like tanks.
I still have a few ~100MB drives in my things and you can feel the difference in quality compared to today.
I always wondered what would happen if you shot them lol. Thanks for satisfying an age old curiosity.
Don’t drink “soda” and shoot guns, you should damn well know better.
(Small amounts of) alcohol is considered a PED in professional shooting. It steadies the hand.
It’s honestly easier to just disassemble them and then hack the platters up, if you’re really that paranoid. Or just melt it down with an inductive heater.
But its not as fun :D
Says someone who’s never melted a hard drive :D
How does one even do that? Like a forge or map gas? I will admit it sounds fun!
Some loops of copper and a LOT of current
Many years ago when we finally sunset out first generation servers, we took them out to a gun range and let the support department have the first shots.
The amount of stress relief the support department felt blowing holes in those servers.
“THATS WHAT YOU GET FOR BREAKING DNS FOR THE LAST TIME!!!”
