Data Destruction at Accio Data

barryboes — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:46:11 +0000

OK, so we take destruction of your data seriously. What does that mean? It means that before data leaves the data center, it’s either encrypted or destroyed. Most of the time this is pretty easy to accomplish — we encrypt it.
But sometimes it’s not possible to encrypt data. Usually this is when physical hardware (like a disk drive) fails. And since we have hundreds of hard drives, individual units fail pretty regularly – around a drive a month fails in our data center. What to do? The standard procedure is to demagnetize the platters before removing the drive from the data center.
This procedure is simple, quick, and good enough for government work. But it’s also invisible. I mean hey, I stuck the hard drive in the degausser with a flux density of 10 KiloTesla’s, but did it work? Sure, the drive comes out glowing and attaching it to a computer results in, well, nothing. But is this a data destruction probability of 99.99993% enough?

We don’t think so, so we decided physical destruction would be the way to go. I mean, you’re not gonna be able to read the data after driving over it with a tractor, right? You’d be surprised…

Of course, with a drive a month failing, we’d like to be able to quickly dispose of them. First thought? Throw it from somewhere high. Quick, easy, and definitive. So we found a tower and Tron scaled it.

Tron risks life and limb for data destruction

Time for a test. A concrete pad at the bottom of the tower offers a great kill zone target, and Tron hit it first try. The results?

This drive bounced 15 feet high after hitting the concrete pad. Can you tell?

Really? After all that work to climb? Maybe something broke inside, but it still looks like you can plug it in from the outside. After a bit of thought, we came up with a brilliant idea — a pickaxe!

Tron wields a pickaxe

Now that’s gotta hurt… our hands. What happened?

Drive after hitting with a pickaxe

Hmm, not much of a dent. Sure, this drive probably isn’t gonna spin up, but what if the NSA got ahold of it? Surely they could recover some data. Maybe we’ve got the wrong guy for the job.

Barry wields a pickaxe

And how well do I do?

Aah... satisfaction

Read that, NSA! But it’s not as good as it looks. The pickaxe did make it all the way through the drive, but it did so by going through the drive outside the platter area. Remember the dent in the drive Tron made? It turns out he ran into the platter. After a bit of dissection, we found that the shell of the hard drive was cast aluminum. Brittle and easy for the pick to go through. But the platters? Steel plates. Thick steel plates. Steel plates that hurt you when you hit them with a pickaxe. We’d better find a better way to do this. Enter the tractor.

Tron prepares to crush the buggers

That bucket is heavy, thick steel. Perfect for slicing through a hard drive, right?

Lifting the front wheels by a hard drive

It turns out that, if you’re working on your tractor and are short jack stands, you can use hard drives. Don’t worry, if you only have a few you can stack them the skinny way. They’re up to the job.

It was worth a try...

Bet you guessed that driving over it would be worthless. We tried it anyway, just to prove that your intuition was right. By now we were getting a bit frustrated, so we did what any good company would do. We turned to consultants. In this case, a demolition expert. His advice? “Use a 10 pound sledge. Nothing can stand up to one of those things”. Ok Mr. Expert, we’ll give it a try.

Tron prepares to demolish a hard drive

And the results are in.

That demolition guy sure did know his stuff

Plug that into your laptop and spin it up.

Now that we’ve tried every destruction method imaginable, it’s time to summarize the results. Here goes : Your data is pretty tough to get rid of.

A hard days work

Barry Boes's Blog

Data Destruction at Accio Data