Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Even a dedicated lab might not be able to read your data once you've hammered nails through the platters.
Usually what they do is they take out the platters in a clean-room environment and place them in an otherwise identical drive, then read from that. But a deformed platter with a hole in it will cause extreme oscillations once you start rotating it at thousands of RPM. Which will crash the head(s) pretty much instantly.
So realistically, outside of an MI6-style lab with Q and his team using custom-built equipment dedicated to reading data from purposely destroyed drives, I don't see how anyone could do it. Would love to hear from someone who works in data recovery or is in contact with people who do, though.
One thing we haven't talked about, by the way, is how to prevent SSDs from having their data recovered. That should be straightforward though, just schwack the NAND chips with a hammer until they're all broken. As with the HDD, be sure to wear appropriate PPE to protect against eye injury and dust inhalation.