Re: The hammer is best

On 2026-08-24 01:42, Joed Oakes wrote:
> On 8/23/26 08:16, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 23/08/2026 12:55, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>> On 2026-08-23 11:14, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>>> [email protected] (Kenny McCormack) writes:
>>>>> Carlos E.R. <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>> ...
>>>>>>>    are hidden buffers plus the wear-leveling scheme
>>>>>>>    gets in the way. You wipe 'em the Hillary Clinton
>>>>>>>    way - HAMMER :-)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Instead, use encryption, on the device or the partitions.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hammer is better, because encryption can be worked around by holding a
>>>>> gun to the head of the person who knows the encryption key.
>>>>
>>>> My backup drives are encrypted. In principle they could be stolen from
>>>> here, from an offsite location or in transit and if that happens I 
>>>> won’t
>>>> have the opportunity to destroy it.
>>>
>>> Exactly.
>>>
>>> And in the typical business case, hammering of disks is not often done. 
>>
>> It is UNIVERSALLY done in the UK.
>> Insurance will be voided, contracts lost  and people will get fired if 
>> it is not.
>>
>> The big sources of usable hardware are BIG corporates - banks, 
>> insurance companies, travel agencies... they dump a thousand machines 
>> a year to recycling companies who sign in blood that the disk will be 
>> CRUSHED.
>>
>>> Hard disks are simply repurposed, recycled, sold... usually zeroing 
>>> them first. Encryption protects the case when zeroing is forgotten, 
>>> or the disk breaks before that. Encryption protects against such 
>>> accidents.
>>>
>> No, they are not. Not by corporations. Some Mickey Mouse companies 
>> with nothing worth stealing might...
> 
> 20 years ago where I worked we used the hammer and drill approach, but 
> that was NEVER environmentally responsible.  NOTE that Western Digital 
> runs a drive recycling program for EOL hard drives.  They may not pay 
> you money, but they do offer credits on new hard drives.
> 
> Considering that China is constricting the availability of rare earth 
> magnets now I think it behooves us to recycle these drives whenever 
> possible.
> 
> WD claims to wipe the drives on arrival, but I still run dd -if /dev/ 
> urandom of=/dev/xxx multiple times on anything I send them...

man urandom

        When  read,  the  /dev/urandom device returns random bytes using 
a pseudorandom number generator seeded from the entropy pool.  Reads 
from this device do not block (i.e., the CPU is not yielded), but can 
incur an appreciable delay when requesting large amounts of data.

My utility in pascal is faster than this, it does not wait.

> 
> Aside from that, I keep all my hard drives encrypted at rest.
> 


-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;