Comment by Nux
14 hours ago
GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.
14 hours ago
GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.
HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.
There is also encryption at rest.
When I used to do computer refurbishment, 'Boot and Nuke' was great for this. Load it up at boot, and write over the with random junk a few times.
All you really need to do is write one pass of zeros on them. That will prevent anyone but a very dedicated adversary with expensive equipment from recovering any data, especially on TB scale drives.
Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.
Or encrypt it and just trash the encryption header.
I make a random 1MB chunk, then write that all over the drive, at overlapping offsets. I've been told that really clears it. On IDE-spinning-rust disks I trusted it, not sure if I should trust these modern SSD
1 reply →
All the large datacenter/cloud companies do not let hard drives leave the building.
They have enough investor money they don't need to recoup it selling used drives. Straight to the shredder.
> HDD can be written multiple times with random data
Which costs more in compute than simply throwing the drive in a shredder
What's the disposal method for shredded drives?
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Not really, if we give the HDD some resale value. There's a market for used but functional hard drives.
Nah, the liquidators aren't going to care about that. Those hard drives are going to be shipped out with all your wildest porn chat bot fantasies.
"Shredded onsite" means by the next user when they format the drive and write contents to it /s
I believe many enterprise drives have instant-erase functionality (presumably deleting an encryption key).
If they were encrypted to begin with, yes. Many are not.
I was under the impression that these drives may be transparently encrypted by default. (Rollable encryption key in hardware, invisible to end-user.)
Depends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.