Security – How to destroy data on a failed hard disk without voiding warranty

hard drivehardwareSecurity

Suppose I have a hard disk with data I don't want to expose to a third party. The warranty period for that disk still lasts. Now the disk starts malfunctioning.

I can't use a disk wiping program on a malfunctioning disk – it just wouldn't work. If I run any destructive action on the disk – burn it, open and scratch it, smash it, whatever similar – the retailer will refuse to exchange the disk saying that the destructive actions void warranty.

How can I destroy sensitive data on a failed disk without voiding warranty?

Best Answer

I would ask, what is the value of the data on the disk?

If it's more than the cost of a new disk, then my preference would be to destroy the faulty disk and buy a new one. You could spend a lot of time trying to get the disk working long enough that you could do a proper erase, but is it worth it? And do you know that it's definitely worked? What if there were some bad sectors that you weren't able to erase properly and still contain some data, even if damaged.

With the cost of hard drives today, if your data's valuable then buying a new disk is not a big expense.

Related Solutions

Hard Drive – How to Destroy a Hard Disk

If you are looking for standard procedures and reliable methods, you could read the Guidelines for Media Sanitization (PDF) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

For any given medium, there are three basic methods:

Clear
Purge
Physical Destruction

For hard drives they recommend:

Clear:

Overwrite media by using agency-approved and validated overwriting technologies/methods/tools.

Physical Destruction:

Disintegrate
Shred
Pulverize
Incinerate: incinerate hard disk drives by burning the hard disk drives in a licensed incinerator.

Purge:

Purge using Secure Erase. The Secure Erase software can be downloaded from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) CMRR site.
Purge hard disk drives by either purging the hard disk drive in an NSA/CSS-approved automatic degausser or by disassembling the hard disk drive and purging the enclosed platters with an NSA/CSS-approved degaussing wand.
Purge media by using agency-approved and validated purge technologies/tools.

Recommendations for flash media (SSDs) are similar, except that degaussing solid state drives is not a viable way to purge them as the data is not stored on magnetic platters.

Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Hard Drive – How to Destroy a Hard Disk

Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

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