Shooting some more hard drives

[OVERKILL]

Had a pretty good collection of drives that needed to be destroyed from work. A few laptop hard drives that had gone bad, a few full sized (3.25") desktop and old SAS drives as well as a few smaller 2.5" SAS drives. Brought out the .308 (700 5R Milspec) and the youth .22 for my middle child (he's 14) which is a nice little mag-fed Marlin bolt and we spent several hours out there. He put a box of .308 through the Remington and did quite well shooting a laptop hard drive off the gong at 100 yards.

Probably the most amusing thing was that I had a stack of about 5 laptop hard drives placed on a 4x4" piece of steel square we shoot. Round went through the first and 2nd drive but on the 3rd drive caught the spindle and blew it straight through the last three drives. You can see the hole in one of the below pics.

All-in-all, a great day at the range, something I don't do often enough.

 

[OilReport99]

Did the encrypted data survive?

Nice pictures

 

[walterjay]

Neat.

 

[OVERKILL]

Did the encrypted data survive?

Nice pictures

Nothing survived this round.

In the last batch I did, a few of the drives were old enough to have metal platters, which remain intact, to some degree, when struck. These all had what appear to be glass platters which completely shatter when hit.

 

[JeffKeryk]

People often ask us about destroying hard drives.
Companies pay big bucks for this service.

Well done!

 

[JimPghPA]

Did you remove the magnets for the kids to have?

 

[chainblu]

Did you use the 22 on any?

 

[OVERKILL]

Did you use the 22 on any?

No, it just bounces off, as do lighter (less than 00 buck) 12 gauge rounds.

 

[OVERKILL]

Did you remove the magnets for the kids to have?

Naw, I used to, but I have a few of them here and the kids don't play with them so I don't bother anymore.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Naw, I used to, but I have a few of them here and the kids don't play with them so I don't bother anymore.

Oil filter magnets.

 

[92saturnsl2]

That looks like fun! I just opened up a couple hard drives to give the platters to my kids (they use them as frisbees or coasters) and magnets for the fridge (also work good as trans pan magnets).

I'll definitely be setting the next ones aside for some recreational shooting. I've never seen glass platters on a 3.5" drive (2.5" is common though,) that's a new one for me.

 

[Drosselmier]

Had a pretty good collection of drives that needed to be destroyed from work. A few laptop hard drives that had gone bad, a few full sized (3.25") desktop and old SAS drives as well as a few smaller 2.5" SAS drives. Brought out the .308 (700 5R Milspec) and the youth .22 for my middle child (he's 14) which is a nice little mag-fed Marlin bolt and we spent several hours out there. He put a box of .308 through the Remington and did quite well shooting a laptop hard drive off the gong at 100 yards.

Probably the most amusing thing was that I had a stack of about 5 laptop hard drives placed on a 4x4" piece of steel square we shoot. Round went through the first and 2nd drive but on the 3rd drive caught the spindle and blew it straight through the last three drives. You can see the hole in one of the below pics.

All-in-all, a great day at the range, something I don't do often enough.



View attachment 32031View attachment 32032View attachment 32033

I thought this was about Golf.

 

[OVERKILL]

That looks like fun! I just opened up a couple hard drives to give the platters to my kids (they use them as frisbees or coasters) and magnets for the fridge (also work good as trans pan magnets).

I'll definitely be setting the next ones aside for some recreational shooting. I've never seen glass platters on a 3.5" drive (2.5" is common though,) that's a new one for me.

I'm guessing it's because they were SAS.

 

[manicrodder]

At times, I have felt like shooting PC and all.

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

just remember, some of that data could still be recovered

 

[OVERKILL]

just remember, some of that data could still be recovered

Not sure how, the platters shattered, some of them into dust.

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

Not sure how, the platters shattered, some of them into dust.

Personally, neither do I but I have an old bud in our group who is a Computer Forensic Engineer/Analyst and according to him, they can literally piece together almost anything and recover varying degrees of data. He says people break/shoot/overwrite drives all the time and its more an annoyance than difficult.

I don't generally parrot the words of another but after seeing some of what his guys do, I have little reason to doubt it.

 

[OVERKILL]

Personally, neither do I but I have an old bud in our group who is a Computer Forensic Engineer/Analyst and according to him, they can literally piece together almost anything and recover varying degrees of data. He says people break/shoot/overwrite drives all the time and its more an annoyance than difficult.

I don't generally parrot the words of another but after seeing some of what his guys do, I have little reason to doubt it.

It's not a huge deal to do it with the older drives with metal platters, because a hole through it still means the rest of the platter(s) is/are somewhat viable. However, with glass platters, you've got a lot of volume of the material that has physically exited the drive in sizes ranging from a couple mm to fine dust and the rest of the material that managed to remain inside the drive is similar in consistency.

The other methods of damage (overwrite, breaking) don't even remotely compare to this level of destruction. I guess I could incinerate the powder that came out of them, but I don't see the point, there'd be no way of putting together what amounts to grains of sand in a manner that would yield anything of value here, particularly given the volume that's missing and now in the field, lol.

I've had to have data recovered off of drives in varying states of damage over the years. This ranged from simple jobs like a failed board to more challenging cases like a head crash on a glass platter that cut a groove the width of the head on it. In that case, a great deal of what was outside of the groove was recoverable, anything within it was gone. I suspect with a platter turned to powder, the whole drive qualifies as "gone" save perhaps for some small data fragments that might be present on larger chunks, if there are any.

If it helps, I can post a few pics of the material in question to give a better idea as to what's left of the platters?

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

If it helps, I can post a few pics of the material in question to give a better idea as to what's left of the platters?

Nah, I was making a point about what can be done based on observations of watching another. I have trouble getting data off the drive on my laptops.

That skill is way outside of my wheelhouse.

 

[Jetronic]

Personally, neither do I but I have an old bud in our group who is a Computer Forensic Engineer/Analyst and according to him, they can literally piece together almost anything and recover varying degrees of data. He says people break/shoot/overwrite drives all the time and its more an annoyance than difficult.

I don't generally parrot the words of another but after seeing some of what his guys do, I have little reason to doubt it.

I had a talk with the head of cyer crime division in antwerp 2 decades ago. If they needed to, they would look at the pieces under a microscope and decipher 1s and 0s from the orientation of the particles...